Fantastic as a Plausibility
by allihearisradiogaga
Summary: Agent Lance McClain is assigned a new partner, Keith Kogane. Their mission? Investigate the unexplainable cases no one else can, and try to shed light on them The problem? Lance wants proof, and Keith wants to believe. When a strange meteor shower leaves a trail of unusual meteorites in the New Mexican desert, they investigate and find more than they could have ever hoped.
1. Unexplained

_A/N: This fic was DEFINITELY in some way prompted by this lil comic: owainigo's post on tumblr about Lance's realization that Keith was a conspiracy theorist and Keith's desert shack in the first episode in general. The plan is that I'll write this so even if you haven't seen the X-Files, you'll be able to enjoy this, as it's more about the dynamic than anything else._

* * *

 **Unexplained**

* * *

 _Mulder: [Agent Scully knocks on his office door] Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted._

 _Scully: Agent Mulder? I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you._

 _Mulder: Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded. So, who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?_

 _Scully: Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you._

 _Mulder: Oh, really? I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me._

* * *

1

Lance walked through the halls of the FBI headquarters, making sure to keep his shoulders back and his head held high, like he had been here before. He, of course, had not been, and he was about to meet with the assistant director to be assigned to his partner for the first time. The other agents at their desks, the analysts in the labs to the side of the building—they didn't need to know that. He just had to project his confidence. He was pretty sure that was what got him this job, anyway.

He arrived at the door he was looking for, knocked once, and waited until he was asked to come in. He did so, and closed the door behind him.

He was facing an imposing-looking man, sitting with his hands folded over his considerable stomach, his beard wild-looking and yet still, somehow, tamed in its own way. He nodded to the chair in front of his desk. Lance crossed the room toward it, holding his hand out to the man as he did. "Lance McClain, sir." The man took his hand and shook it, breaking off as Lance sat down.

"Assistant Director Ross," replied the man, picking up a file on his desk. "Mr. McClain, I have to say, it's very interesting that I find you here in my office today."

Lance raised an eyebrow in response, and Ross continued. "Considering your background, it seems like you would be better suited to a laboratory at NASA rather than looking for fieldwork with the bureau."

"Well, sir, I found my old line of work was getting all a little too…" He searched for the word, twisting his hand in the air in front of him as he did. "… _theoretical_. I wanted to discover new things, yeah, but I want _facts_."

"So you decided to become an investigator for the FBI."

"The next logical step."

"Hmm." The man turned his eyes down to skim over a bit more of Lance's file, and Lance felt a little sweat around his collar. He didn't think the assistant director was as impressed with him as he hoped he would be. He reminded himself to stay confident, and brought his smile back into full force. "I wasn't sure what exactly to _do_ with a man of your background," he said, "at first, I mean. It isn't every day we get a former astrophysicist in our ranks. Doctors, lawyers, police officers—those types are more likely to apply to be agents."

"I live to defy stereotypes, sir," said Lance, wondering where his superior was going with this.

"The point is, I would hate to waste your prior experience. And I think we've found just the right spot for you."

"Oh?" Lance sat up a little bit straighter, ready to hear what came next. _This_ is what he had been working for, training for, ever since he left the lab.

"You see, we have a small division that focuses mainly on _unexplained_ phenomena." He seemed to reconsider what he said, and began again. "When I say small, I mean, as of late, one agent. But I would like to change that."

"You want me to do… what, exactly?"

"These cases, they're real cases, but the circumstances around them make them a little bit more… extraordinary than our normal caseload." Ross closed the folder and slid it across the desk to Lance. "You'll be working with Agent Keith Kogane, who currently heads this division. While you two will be partners, I hope to receive, personally, a detailed and _scientific_ account of each case you two encounter."

"Wait, you mean the normal reports we'll file after each investigation?"

"No," said Ross, and Lance's brow furrowed. "While Agent Kogane is well known to be a great investigator and well-thought agent, sometimes his own fervor can… _tamper_ with his ability to report the facts of a case in a straightforward way, without any bias." He took a breath, and his eyes focused on Lance's. "I trust that you can bring some scientific clarity to the cases you two will be assigned. And that your reports will be suitably unbiased and _confidential_. Am I clear."

"Crystal."

"Good. I'll have you meet Agent Kogane now, and just…" He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked to Lance. "I know Keith means well. Make sure he _does_ well."

"Yes, thank you, sir." Lance stood and began to reach his hand out to shake Ross's hand, but stopped when he saw that his superior didn't stand, either. And Lance didn't want to play himself a fool on his first day. Instead, he nodded toward Ross and headed for the door.

2

He found Kogane's office in the basement of the building, and at first, he wasn't sure it was going to be an office at all—it seemed like it was the only door in the hallway that didn't lead to a janitorial closet or storage room. However, the nameplate on the door said "Keith Kogane," so Lance figured it was the only correct option. He knocked, and entered when he heard a "Come on in," from the other side.

He wasn't sure what he expected from his brief discussion with Ross, but he was sure that this was exactly it. To say that the room was cluttered was an understatement. There were piles of papers and files _everywhere_ , and not a smidgeon of the wall was visible underneath the layers of posters and papers tacked to it, creating a web of words and headlines such as "MYSTERY EXPOSED" and "UNEXPLAINED?" that seemed just confusing to Lance.

A shaggy-haired young man in a white shirt with a loosened tie looked up to him from the file he was scanning through. "Hi," he said, squinting at Lance. "Who're you?"

"Oh, I'm…" Lance scrambled in his jacket pocket for his badge. When he was able to fish it out, he displayed it, upside-down. "I'm Agent Lance McClain."

"Well, Agent _McClain_ ," said Kogane with what Lance figured must have been fake respect, "What brings you all the way down to the dusty basement of the bureau?"

"Actually," said Lance, his eyes tracing over a few of the various stacks of paranoia periodicals and table near the door, "I'm your new partner."

This changed Kogane's tune a bit. He stood up and took a few steps toward Lance, sizing him up as he did. Once he seemed to be satisfied, he threw his hands up in defeat. "They just sent you here to spy on me. They think I'm crazy."

Lance stopped where he was, his hand stopping on the top of one of the stacks of magazines. Wasn't that, in a manner of speaking, what they had asked him to do? The private reports to Ross definitely seemed like it.

At the same time, it had been clear that Ross _respected_ Kogane, that he wanted him to succeed. He just needed Lance, a hard-headed outsider, to help bring more legitimacy to the department.

"No," said Lance, smiling as he did. "I'm not here to _spy_ on you." He decided that it was not _technically_ typing, since Kogane would be submitting his own reports, as well, of all of the investigations they would complete. "Though I do think I have been put here to help bring some, uh, scientific reputability to your cases."

"Oh," said Kogane, settling back into his desk chair. "Great. You're not a spy. You're just my babysitter."

" _Damn_ , you're narcissistic," snapped Lance. Keith's eyes snapped back up to his, flared. "I'm not here because of _you_." Lance threw his hands up and let out a frustrated huff. "I'm not going to bother with _whatever_ complex you've given yourself. I'm just going to do my job."

He finished, and Keith simply stared at him for a moment, and Lance _assumed_ this meant that the cogs were slowly working their way together under that mop of hair of his. Lance let his hands fall and leaned back against the doorframe. Then, Kogane finally spoke.

"So," he said, "do you believe in the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life?"

Lance now understood what Ross was worried about with this guy. He decided to tread carefully, spelling out his answers as accurately as he could, considering his scientific background. "I believe in the possibility of life forms forming in extraterrestrial situations, yes. With the vastness of the universe, paired with the possibility of non-carbon-based lifeforms…"

"That's the kind of answer I expected from you," said Kogane, scoffing. Lance slouched and raised an eyebrow. Keith continued. "You were what, a biologist before you came here?"

"Astrophysicist."

"That's _rich_ ," said Kogane, actually chuckling a bit as he did, leaning forward in his chair. "Of course you were. Of _course_ they put you with me." He turned his attention from his own thoughts back to Lance. "You know that scientific progress is best achieved if you don't let your findings be tainted by preconceptions of what might be."

"Isn't that what a hypothesis _is_?" Lance let out a sigh of annoyance and crossed his arms.

"I'm just saying, you might have _your_ assignment," said Kogane, his voice becoming more quiet as he did, "but this is my work, and I believe in it. If you have to scrutinize, do it, but take it seriously, and for the love of _God_ , have an open mind."

Lance looked to his new partner and saw the way that red came to his cheeks, the way that his chest was heaving a little bit—this really _was_ his life's work. And it might be ridiculous, but it was what he was passionate about. And who was he to judge? People laughed when he left the astrophysics lab to become an investigator. People laughed when he left small-town living for astrophysics. When you want something _more_ , people think it's stupid, and even if he was one of those people in this case, he _could_ keep an open mind, he figured, or at least try. As long as Kogane decided not to be an abrasive asshole about it.

"So," said Lance, taking a step in from the doorframe and shoving some files off of an extra chair so he could sit down, "what sort of a case should we work on first? Bigfoot? Crop circles?"

Keith narrowed his eyes at Lance, and Lance would have been lying to himself if he didn't admit, internally, that he got a rise out of it. He bent down from his spot in his desk chair and picked up one of the files Lance had sent to the floor. He shuffled the papers back into working order and handed it to Lance. "Actually," he said, "we're dealing with a much more interesting case. Something _real_."

Lance stifled a laugh, trying to keep an open mind, and took the file, opening it up in his lap. It was thick, and the front page was a title page. "Undocumented File #84: CLASSIFIED" was printed on it, and Lance wondered if this department took itself too seriously. He flipped to the next page.

"You'll see the details in there," said Keith, "but recently there was a freak meteor shower—something out of the ordinary, according to the local astronomical and meteorological community, basically something that was wasn't _supposed_ to happen. And if you flip ahead…" he reached over, half-standing and half-squatting from his chair to flip through the pages in Lance's hands, "…you'll see that there were meteorites that were discovered as a part of the shower." He withdrew his hand and Lance looked down at the picture, a high-def shot of a patch of desert littered with a series of dark spots, presumably where the meteorites had struck the earth.

"So?" Lance looked from the pictures to his new partner. "There are freak meteor showers—well, not _frequently_ , but not infrequently enough to cause any sort of _real_ irregularity…"

Keith's brow furrowed in something that resembled a pout as he reached forward again, thumbing through pages, upside-down to him, in Lance's hands. Lance watched as Keith brushed the hair out of his face that fell into his vision, never breaking his intense scrutiny of the pages as he did. "That picture you just saw was the one an amateur photographer snapped on a hike and sold to the local paper for a couple of bucks." He offered the file back toward Lance. " _This_ is a photo sent to me by someone who is a bit more interested in extraterrestrial phenomena than the everyday bystander."

Lance diverted his attention from Kogane to the photograph. He raised an eyebrow. "What is this?"

"A meteorite discovered yesterday afternoon in the New Mexico desert."

"No, really, Keith." Lance looked to him, figuring he would break the fanatic ruse he _had_ to be putting on. Maybe he thought there was a conspiracy behind the J.F.K. shooting and that there might be a creature akin to bigfoot in the woods, or a large fish in the Loch Ness, but that didn't mean that he legitimately believed _this_ could have fallen from outer space, from an unidentified location—an _alien_ location.

Keith didn't say anything, and Lance inspected the picture again. "But…" said Lance. "You're saying this came from space?" He squinted at the picture. "From _RadioShack_ , maybe, but _space_?" He dropped the file into his lap. "Keith, my dude, this is fake."

Kogane pulled the file back from Lance, closing the folder over the picture of charred machinery, like a friend circuit board, in the sand. "It might be," he said, "but I'm not convinced, and neither is the guy in the photography lab upstairs. He says it's not a forged picture. I think it could be real."

"Seriously?"

"The higher-ups in the bureau said they'd only approve this investigation once my new partner was assigned," said Keith. He spun around and clicked a few things on this computer before spinning back around to face Lance again, a new webpage loading in the background. "I just booked our flight—we leave at seven o'clock tomorrow morning."

"What?"

"You're worried it's a hoax," said Keith, handing the file back to Lance, who closed his hand around it without even really thinking. "We're going to investigate this. Because I'm worried that it's _not_."

* * *

 _Special Agent Fox Mulder: [to Scully] Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?_


	2. Researchers

_Scully: I have never met anyone so passionate and dedicated to a belief as you. It's so intense that sometimes it's blinding._

* * *

 **Researchers**

* * *

3

What Lance hadn't thought about what that if they were to leave on a seven o'clock flight, that meant they would have to show up to the airport at least a couple of hours early. When he met his partner at the terminal, Kogane was clean, awake, and presentable. Lance, who was not even sure he had packed any full set of clothes in his hasty preparations for the trip, held up one finger and opened his mouth, about to speak, before placing his bag on the ground in front of his partner, turning, and walking away. He was sure this would look strange to Keith, but all was explained when he returned a few moments later with a very large cup of coffee from the airport Starbucks. Kogane smirked, and Lance just picked up his bag and kept walking toward the waiting area, grumbling a "morning" as he slumped by.

A few hours later they were soaring across the country toward New Mexico and Lance, no longer feeling he needed to put on a cool front of confidence for his partner—at least not at a repeating seven A.M. as they traversed time zones— _snored_ across the country. Keith simply readjusted his position in the seat, between his partner, whose face was smeared against the window, and an elderly man who had paid for the noise-cancelling headphones back in the terminal so he could watch _Beverly Hills Cop 2_ in peaceful silence. That was all fine for Keith, who simply opened the case file again, searching through the same information he had practically memorized over the previous few days.

By the time they began their descent—and Keith would not admit this, but—he was nodding off to sleep, as well. He was brought back from his half-slumber by Lance, who had the habit of _stretching_ when he woke.

An hour later, they were in a rented car on their way to Karin, New Mexico, a small town where the meteorites had been found. Lance had the case file in his lap in the passenger seat, going over the details anew.

"So," he said, "we're going to meet the guy who sent you the pictures."

"The guy who sent me the close-ups, yeah." Keith's hands flexed around the steering wheel, and he kept his eyes on the road ahead.

"You know him?" Lance noted with interest that there was no name listed along with the picture, nothing that would identify the photographer except the location and a thirty-minute timeframe of how long after the shower the picture was taken (seven hours, forty minutes to eight hours, ten minutes).

"I do," said Kogane, keeping his eyes ahead still. There was a pause, and Lance spoke up.

"Would you like to share?"

"Not really," said Keith. Lance scrunched his eyebrows together, but before he could complain further, Keith sighed. "His name is Takashi Shirogane."

Lance's eyes widened and his draw dropped. "You— _what_?"

"I take it you've heard of him." Keith didn't sound surprised.

"I'm an astrophysicist!" Lance threw his hands in the air, almost scattering the file as he did so. "How could I _not_ know about Shirogane?" He turned to Keith. " _That_ 's why you waited until now to tell me who we were meeting."

Keith shrugged.

"God damn it," said Lance, dropping his hands into his lap. "You ask me to keep an open mind, but you're basing your investigation on what _he_ says he's found?"

"He knows what he's talking about."

"Do _you_?" Lance placed a hand on his forehead and shook his head. "There's a reason they sent him home from NASA so quickly. There's a reason the Kerberos program is shut down." Lance glanced to Keith, whose knuckles were white as eh gripped the steering wheel, facing ahead as he continued to drive, his jaw set.

After a moment, he spoke. "Why do you think they were shut down?" His words were slow, careful.

"Because Shirogane is crazy!"

"No," said Keith quickly. "Because Shirogane is _right_."

4

The house was a glorified shack, and it was in the middle of nowhere, but a little bit more out of the way. The peeling paint and stagnant windmill gave the impression of a drought-stricken abandoned farm, but the blacked-out windows painted a different picture. They stood on the creaky wooden porch, and Keith knocked. They stood and waited for a moment. Lance could hear someone inside of the home moving to the door, probably looking through the peephole in the door. After another moment longer, the deadbolts on the other side of the door began to turn.

The door opened, and a tall, muscular man with a white streak in his bangs stood on the other side, stone-faced. "You said you would come alone."

Lance raised an eyebrow, and Keith glanced at him sideways. "This is my new partner," said Keith. "Special Agent Lance McClain. He will not be a problem." The way Keith said this, Lance felt that was directed more toward him than toward Shirogane. "We'll leave your name and any identifying information out of our reports." Lance's eyes widened and he looked to Kogane, brows almost touching his wide eyes, but Keith looked only at Shirogane, ignoring whatever looks his partner was giving him.

Shirogane narrowed his eyes and looked both of the men over one more time before stepping back and gesturing for them to come inside. The agents entered, and Lance was surprised.

He had expected this place to be reminiscent of Kogane's office, full of clutter and strung-together paranoid theories. But this was a normal house for a normal person, or at least it seemed so. They followed Shirogane into the kitchen, where they sat at the counter on stools. They waited for a moment while their host left the room to re-lock the front door before rejoining them again.

"So, Lance," said Keith, "This is Takashi Shirogane."

"I'm glad to meet you," said Lance, holding out his hand to shake the man's. Shirogane held up his own hand, which was not a hand at all, but a prosthetic. Lance hesitated, and then took and shook it, considering that though it was awkward, it would be more awkward if he didn't take it when offered.

"So," said Kogane, "you know why we're here. We need to know more about the meteorites."

Takashi stiffened, and Lance felt uncomfortable in his position. Whatever Shirogane was about to tell them, he wouldn't be able to relay with any good conscience in his report. And without being able to make any identifying notes about him, there would be no way for him to communicate his reasons for believing Shirogane to be an unreliable source of information.

"You received the picture I sent. And I have more pictures, but I think—it would probably be best if you saw the pieces in person."

"You are sure you know these…" Lance searched for the word, and settled on the same on Shirogane had used. "… _pieces_ are the result of the meteor shower, and didn't just happen to be in the same area, a dumping some of old VCRs or something after a rowdy bonfire or something?"

Shirogane lifted an eyebrow and crossed his arms, his prosthetic on top of his other arm. "A skeptic, huh?" He exhaled, and turned to Keith. "You know he might make it easier for you to legitimize this kind of investigation."

"It might also make it harder to investigate," said Keith, glaring at Lance like he'd made him look a fool in front of the popular kids at recess.

"But I can verify within a very small margin of error that the remnants I found came from the meteor shower," said Shirogane, turning back from the counter behind him and retrieving a file from it. He opened it up and slid it across the counter to Keith and Lance. They leaned in to get a better look at it as Shirogane continued to speak. "By tracking the shower and using some triangulation techniques, along with some readings from a device a friend of mine constructed for this very purpose, we were able to determine that these _were_ the meteorites we saw in the sky. There were no other remnants around the estimated point of impact that could have been from foreign objects."

Lance glanced up at Takashi from his admittedly well-documented notes of the shower. As much as he didn't want to admit it, and as much as he didn't want to trust Shirogane or his friend's homemade astronomical equipment, the numbers checked out. "Okay," he said. "So these really are the meteorites. How do we know they're anything more than conveniently shaped rocks for anyone with a claim of abduction?"

Shirogane winced, and Keith narrowed his eyes at Lance. "What?" he said, and Keith rolled his eyes.

"I think what my thick-headed partner is _trying_ to say is that we would really like to see the meteorites for ourselves, and have the opportunity to investigate firsthand."

Lance was about to chime in to protest his label of "thick-headed," but Keith kicked him in the shin before he could. Lance clamped his mouth shut and glared at his partner.

"Well, I figure I could have my friends bring us all out there; explain the readings…" Shirogane trailed off.

"I think that would be best," said Keith. "If we get a close-up look at the things, it'll put us one step closer to figuring out where they came from."

Lance choked back a comment about the legitimacy of the alleged extraterrestrial artifacts and just nodded. Whatever they were trying to pass off as space debris would be easier to delegitimize if he saw it in person.

"How far out is it to the site?" asked Keith, standing from his stool. Lance and Takashi stood, as well, Shirogane pushing his stool in as he did.

"Only about fifteen minutes," said Shirogane, taking some keys from a bowl on the counter. "If you would like to follow me in your car, I can call my friends—they constructed the equipment, and can explain the mathematics a whole lot better than I can—and have them meet us there."

"Please do," said Kogane. "And know our offer of confidentiality extends to them, as well, as long as they can prove to be strong enough contributors to this investigation."

"Thank you," said Shirogane, reaching for his phone in a cradle by the refrigerator, and Keith motioned to Lance for him to lead the way out of the home, which he did, pausing to unlock the series of deadbolts before gaining access to the other side.

5

"Well," said Kogane once they were in the car and following Shirogane's truck down a dusty desert road. "You did an excellent job of being a perfect jackass back there."

Lance scoffed. " _Me_?" He placed his fingers on his chest in faux incredulity. " _I'm_ the jackass? Which one of us promised confidentiality when it could more than likely hurt the investigation's validity when we turn in our results?"

"Are you stuck in Academy, or is your mind still in your astrology lab?" asked Keith. "Because the only way we were going to get _any_ information from Shirogane is _because_ I promised him anonymity."

"Yeah, all of the information we can't use because of _who_ it came from!" Lance grumbled and slumped back in the passenger seat.

"He has experience…"

"He has _claims_!" Lance could feel how red his face was becoming in his anger, but he couldn't believe how completely _dense_ his partner was. "He has nothing but wild claims and a crew that never came back!" He paused to take a breath, his face not diminishing its color at all. "So excuse me if I don't count him as a reliable source. _NASA_ obviously didn't."

"And what about his scars?" asked Keith, his hands rotating on the wheel as he drove, as if he were attempting to accelerate a motorcycle.

"What about them?"

"What about his _arm_? Do you think that he just _claimed_ it away?"

"I don't know _what_ happened," said Lance, feeling the ice in his voice and the heat in his cheeks, "but I _highly_ doubt it was due to alien experimentation."

"There's that 'open mind' you were keeping. Great to see you've been able to try to learn new things."

"We're talking about _aliens_!" Lance threw his hands up with such gusto that he _thwacked_ his wrist against the light panel in the car's ceiling.

"And?"

"You believe in them? You're a grown man and you believe in aliens!"

"Does that delegitimize my place in this investigation?" asked Agent Kogane.

Lance paused, and was careful with his words. "It… It puts you in a biased position, one that _might_ tamper with an unbiased, scientific account of what's happened."

"Oh?" said Keith. He almost looked from the road to his partner so he could argue with him in a more straightforward way, but he then kept his eyes on the road. "And your biased, 'rational' position doesn't immediately discount—"

"No!" shouted Lance, and he knew that his tempter had outweighed rationality, but didn't particularly care. "No, it doesn't discount your ideas of extra-terrestrials! But I _am_ going to be wary of half-baked delusions of little gray men!"

The rental car filled with silence after that, save for the slight _whrrr_ of the air conditioner as it blew lukewarm air at their faces. The silence was broken with Keith's quiet murmur that there was no evidence of any extraterrestrial being having the construct of gender, but Lance didn't even acknowledge it. He crossed his arms and leaned back into the passenger seat, watching Shirogane's tailgate ahead of them and the endless desert disappearing into mesas on every side. He was going to do his job, and do it right, no matter what his _delusional_ partner had to say about it.

6

They pulled off of the road onto a dirt road seeming to stretch to nowhere, which they followed for just a minute or two before Shirogane pulled off to the side, stopping his truck. Kogane pulled off of the road and parked next to him. Kogane got out of the car and went to Shirogane, probably to pick up some extra details or small talk while they waited for Shirogane's _friends_. Lance just hoped that they would be a bit more rational about this whole thing.

He also knew that he shouldn't get his hopes up.

He gathered up the camera he had kept in the backseat and shed his jacket before emerging into the desert heat. He rolled his sleeves up, squinting into the horizon beneath the sun as an SUV bumbled down the dirt road toward them. Lance joined Shirogane and Kogane without saying a word to either of them as the SUV pulled up next to Shirogane's truck and two people stepped out of the front seats. Shirogane went to them and greeted them, leaning to the shorter one and whispering something in their ear before they nodded and the three of them joined the two agents.

"Hello," said Keith, holding out his hand to them. "My name is Special Agent Keith Kogane, and this is my partner, Special Agent Lance McClain." Whatever animosity that was between them in the car melted away, at least for these others to see. Lance simply held his hand out and shook the hands of the two newcomers.

"I'm Hunk. Garrett," said the larger man, a grin spreading across his face.

"And you are?" asked Lance, looking toward the smaller person. "Mr.…" He hesitated, tried again. "Er—Ms.…"

" _Doctor_ Gunderson," replied the small one, adjusting their large glasses. "Though I suppose you could just call me 'Pidge.' I know Hunk will." Hunk beamed.

"We need to show them the meteoroid pieces," said Shirogane. "And maybe you can explain what you've found about the shower itself, Pidge." He gestured with his prosthetic hand toward Lance. "Agent McClain here was formerly an astrophysicist before joining the bureau. I'm sure he'll be able to make sense of what you've found."

"I know _I_ don't," said Hunk, opening the back of the SUV and pulling out a large and heavy-looking piece of equipment. He explained to Keith: "I'm the engineer of the operation. They're more the theoretical brain. I work practical." He lifted the machinery into his arms, a box of metal with some buttons and a small screen, as well as some appendages Lance wasn't going to even to guess the purpose of. He grinned. "This is heavy, so Shiro, you want to lead the way?"

Shirogane nodded and closed the back of the SUV for Hunk, stepping past him into the desert. The rest followed.

"So, you're an astrophysicist?" asked Pidge, walking beside Lance.

"Yeah," said Lance, "or, rather, I used to be, before I joined the bureau."

"Bit of a change in careers there," said Pidge.

"I want to discover new things," said Lance. "It's not really _that_ different."

"…Sure," said Pidge, not seeing convinced of this fact, and kept walking. They were sprightly, and didn't seem to mind the sun and heat as it bore down on them. Lance loosened his collar a bit more and decided he might as well find out a little more about his confidential informants.

"So, what brought the three of you together?" asked Lance. Gunderson met his eyes.

"Oh, Hunk and Shiro and I?" They scratched on their cheek absentmindedly. "Well, Hunk and I go _way_ back. We both have worked together for a while on this magazine—like, an information one, not one of those rags at the grocery aisles—about the stuff that we find."

"What kind of stuff do you find?" asked Lance, immediately wondering to himself if he really wanted to know.

"Extraterrestrial noise, irregular patterns of space debris, chatter on different topics like that…" Pidge trailed off, their eyes flitting over Lance, magnified by their enormous glasses, realizing that he was quickly being lost. "Perhaps a little different than your background."

"A little," said Lance, only realizing after he'd spoken how dry the phrase was, coming out of his mouth.

"Well, it might be, but we don't just chase flies," said Pidge. They pushed their glasses up the bridge of their nose and Lance was reminded that despite their demure appearance, they had introduced themselves as _doctor_. "While I'm sure you think this is all far-fetched—and I don't blame you, most people do—we are careful and scientific about everything we do. This is all very serious to us."

They weren't lying, Lance could tell that, and he was reminded of what Keith had said before about an open mind. Maybe that sort of an open mind was what had caused Pidge Gunderson— _Doctor_ Pidge Gunderson—to change their focus to conspiracies. He could see Kogane walking ahead with Shirogane and Hunk, talking, and wondered if that was what got _him_ into this line of investigation.

"What about Shirogane? Takashi?"

"Oh, Shiro?" Pidge looked forward at the tall man. "He came to us a little bit ago—after the whole trouble with the Kerberos mission, you know, and said he'd read our magazine. And that was flattering and all, considering his personal experience. We didn't have a position for him in the publication—which was fine, he wasn't looking for a job—but he was happy, I think, to find some people who would believe in him, you know?" Pidge paused for a moment before continuing. "It can hurt, you know, when you've got a truth that you know but no one will believe."

Lance wasn't sure what to respond to that, but he didn't have much of a chance because at that moment Hunk halted to place the piece of equipment on the sandy ground. This prompted Pidge to rush over to admonish him for not clearing out a space for it, saying something about "grains all up in the sensors." Lance joined his partner and Shirogane.

"Is this the impact site?" asked Keith, his eyes scanning the ground around them beneath the improvised visor of a flattened hand.

"Yes," said Shirogane, nodding and pointing toward the area ahead of them. Lance didn't see anything. "But they must have been covered in sand since we were last here."

"There hasn't been any wind since we were last here," said Hunk, standing from where he had been squatting to work with the equipment.

Shirogane's brow furrowed, and he knelt down in the sand, pawing it out of the way with his good hand. After a moment, Keith squatted down next to him, using both hands to sweep through the sand next to him. Pidge and Hunk took a few steps forward, as to join them, but stopped. After a moment, Keith ceased as well. Shirogane kept digging at the soft sand until Keith put a hand on his shoulder.

None of them had to say a thing, because they all knew it already—the meteorites, whatever they were, were gone.

* * *

 _Albert Hosteen: In the desert, things find a way to survive. Secrets are like this too. They push their way up through the sands of deception so men can know them._


	3. Evidence

_[On sea monsters]_

 _ **Mulder** : Sounds like you know a little something about the subject._

 _ **Scully** : I did as a kid, but then I grew up and became a scientist._

* * *

 **Evidence**

* * *

7

 _…_ _When Agent Kogane and myself arrived at the site of the meteorites in question with our informants, we found the site to be lacking the debris that we had specifically come to investigate. Though we do have some personal interviews to conduct with the local citizens of Karin. I am unsure of the basis of this investigation_ _without_ _this crucial material evidence. Therefore, either the focus of our investigation will shift toward the location and retrieval of the suspiciously missing evidence or we will be forced to close the case until further notice._

Lance stared at the blinking cursor for a moment, unsure of what else he should add to the report. He wasn't about to send it in until he was finished with the investigation, but he figured putting down the details while they were still fresh couldn't be a bad thing.

Kogane re-entered the motel room from the bathroom in just a white tee shirt and boxers, his hair still wet from the shower he'd just finished. Lance closed the document window and then closed his laptop altogether so his partner couldn't see what he had been doing. He shoved the laptop off of his lap onto the bed beside him.

"Got to put away the porn because I'm back in the room?" asked Keith, laying back onto the other bed.

"I was researching the area, Kogane. Don't get excited."

Keith raised an eyebrow, but didn't push any further. He sat up against his pillow and headboard and used the remote to turn on the TV. Lance watched him out of the corer of his eye as he did. Kogane was surprisingly calm after the disappearance of the one thing they had come out to investigate.

"So…" said Lance, sliding off of his bed and opening up his suitcase. "What do we do next?" He pulled out a pair of boxers and a towel, but kept rummaging through. "Do we keep on with the investigation here, or do we move on to whatever's next on the list?"

Keith turned to Lance from the muted TV. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "this _is_ the list."

"There's no other cases, or…?"

"No, there are other unexplained cases in the filing cabinet, but this one—this one just got very interesting."

Lance pushed through the mess of his bag once more. "Interesting?" he asked. "The only evidence we have is gone!"

"That's what's interesting," said Keith. He shifted on the bed, so he was propped up on his elbow and facing Lance. "When we came to this town, what did you see on the sides of the road?"

"I don't know. Some bushes. Sand. Like, one or two cool cactuses. Cacti. Some rusted junk…"

" _Exactly,_ " said Keith. "I'm not knocking Karin's ability to recycle, but it seems like most of their junk that ends up in the desert ends up there to rust away, and pretty much becomes a part of the scenery. And that means it's not regularly picked up by a do-gooding highway patrol."

"And?"

"Someone picked up those meteorites _on purpose_ , so that we wouldn't find them."

Lance forced himself not to roll his eyes for two reasons. The first was that he didn't want a repeat of the argument that they'd had earlier that day in the car and were now unhealthily repressing. Two, he had forgotten his shampoo, and wanted to borrow Keith's.

"I forgot my shampoo," said Lance, changing the subject before he could say anything that would just piss his partner off. "Can I borrow yours?" He made toward the bathroom, towel in hand. "Normally, I'd just forgo the lather, but my hair's full of sand…"

"Go for it," said Keith. He thumbed the remote to turn the sound on the TV back on and dropped the remote next to him on the bed. Lance went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

Lance stripped down and got into the shower, letting the water get hot and steamy. Keith had probably taken a cold shower after a hot day in the desert, but Lance had always liked his showers to be almost hot enough to burn him. He wetted his hair, and reached for the bottle of shampoo Kogane had left behind. It was some kind of moisturizing shampoo, for dry scalps. Lance made a mental note to see if his partner had any dandruff, but immediately pushed it away, realizing how both gross and creepy that would be.

He scrubbed at his scalp, making sure to shake loose any grains of sand that had blown in there during the day, and then worked his shoulders, arms, and chest. Every bit of him felt dry, and he wished he's brought _something_ to keep his skin moisturized, but he knew that he'd really skimped on toiletries when he packed his bag in a hurry, and he was lucky to have remembered a toothbrush. He finished scrubbing at his skin, resisted belting out a pop song he'd heard in the airport, and rinsed his hair before shutting off the water and exiting the shower. He dried off and pulled his new set of boxers on before whipping his towel over his shoulders and opening the door to the room.

Kogane was sitting upright in his bed, the TV muted again. He looked to Lance, his brows drawn and his eyes serious. "Who have you reported to about our mission?"

Lance froze in his spot. He felt even more naked than he actually was—which was amazing, since he was standing there in only his underwear. "What?"

"The only people who knew about this mission were you, me, and Shiro." His eyes did not leave Lance's, and Lance was glad he wasn't a suspect being interrogated by Kogane—if this was his look for asking his partner questions, he could only imagine how intimidating he could be when shaking someone down for answers. "Shio wasn't about to disrupt the site himself. It was the only thing that would lend credulity to his situation." He paused and, for the first time since Lance had left the bathroom, blinked. "Someone else had to know. Someone must have found out, and not wanted up to find what was there."

"What about other locals?" asked Lance. He wished he'd found something other than his boxers to bring into the bathroom with him. His palms were sweating against the wet towel slung over his shoulders.

Kogane shook his head. "Shirogane was telling me there are enough celestial events around here, with such clear skies, that most of the locals don't pay any mind to them."

"But didn't _you_ tell your supervisory officer about…"

"I was as vague as possible," said Kogane, cutting Lance off. "They know I get results, but my— _our_ —division doesn't have enough respect for me to just claim we're out here looking for space rocks."

"Well, it could be—"

" _Lance_." Keith's eyes narrowed. "Who have you reported to about his mission?"

Lance hesitated for the briefest of moments before answering. "No one," he said. "You had already filled out the travel request. I figured I didn't need to." Keith kept his eyes locked on him for another moment before looking away. Lance took this break as an opportunity to move around Keith's bed to his own, where he grabbed a tee shirt from his bag and pulled it on. Kogane frowned at the muted TV, and Lance wondered if he realized that he had been lying.

8

When Lance dialed the number at three in the morning, standing in the surprisingly chilly motel parking lot in boxers and a tee shirt, he isn't sure the Assistant Director will pick up, even if he's two hours later. It's still 5 A.M. Eastern Time, and that's _damn_ early.

Ross picked up on the first ring. "Agent McClain?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm sure there's a good reason you're calling me at such an early hour." He didn't sound grumpy or concerned, just _stern_.

"Yes, sir. I just—there's been an unexpected bump in our plans here, and I am sorry, but I need to know—"

"Spit it out, Agent McClain."

"The meteorites we are here to investigate have gone missing," said Lance, doing his best to keep his voice down. He left the room, but he wasn't sure how light of a sleeper Kogane was. "The only people who know of it other than Agent Kogane and I are our informants and you, sir."

"What are you insinuating, McClain?"

"I'm insinuating nothing, sir," said Lance. "However, Agent Kogane has been suspicious of my ability to keep confidentiality. Asking to whom I report."

"You kept quiet, I hope."

"I did," said McClain, "and will continue to do so. But Kogane is nothing if not persistent. I will do my best but he might find out some other way." Lance paused. "And, pardon me, sir, but reporting on my partner and lying to him about it seems more than a little…" He searched for the right word and didn't find it. "…uncool."

There was a brief silence on the line before Ross replied. "I will look into it, where the information went, _quietly._ Don't make any indication or suggestion that this exchange even happened." Lance nodded before realizing he was on the phone and the Assistant Director could not see him. "Go back to sleep, Agent McClain."

"Thank you, sir," responded Lance, but Ross had already hung up his side of the line. Lance stared at the screen for a moment before deleting the history of the call from his phone. He didn't think that Kogane was going to be snooping, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

He held his phone in his hand and leaned against an old payphone box whose phone had been removed many years ago. He tilted his head back and looked toward the sky. He saw the stars, and they were beautiful in the wide, clear sky. It was what was between them, though, that was interesting. The things too far away to see. Different galaxies. Things not yet known. There were things _out there_ that he didn't even remotely understand. There wasn't the technology to fully understand it—it was too far away.

This left only theories. _Good_ theories, one based on scientific research and the most educated calculations possible.

There still wasn't any _proof_ , though. He balled his hands into fists and crossed his arms over his chest. They needed to find some sort of evidence, retrieve some part of the meteorites, from whoever took them.

Because however much Lance wasn't going to admit it to his partner, he was very keenly interested in finding out where they had come from—pieces of extraterrestrial technology or, more likely, not. He needed to _know_.

Lance turned back to his motel room and quietly slipped through the threshold, closing the door behind him and not noticing the single meteor that streaked across the sky, just above the motel's parking lot.

9

The Denny's off of the highway was not very busy—only a few older couples shared the restaurant. Agents Kogane and McClain sat in their booth, coffee in hand, halfway through their breakfast meals. They hadn't said to each other, but it _had_ been wordlessly decided that they would stay to find out where the pieces of meteorite had gone.

"So," said Lance, his mouth half-full of hash browns, pointing his fork at his partner, "how many crab legs have you had to eat to keep your cover during an investigation?"

Keith raised an eyebrow and half-scowled. "What kind of question is that?"

"Look, we're partners, and I feel like we hardly know anything about each other." He took another mouthful of egg from his fork. "So it's, like," he swallowed, "a dumb little icebreaker question, to get our bonding rolling."

"That's dumb," replied Keith, looking down to his plate of breakfast and reaching for the toast.

"And that's not an answer." Lance grinned. "Come on, Kogane. How many crab legs?"

Keith took a bite of his toast and chewed it, making a point to look anywhere in the restaurant but at his partner, who was waiting expectantly. He reached for his coffee and took a sip before sighing. "Fine." He took another sip of the coffee, still glaring at Lance. "None. I guess. I mean, I remember eating some _once_ while on assignment in Alaska, but it wasn't to keep cover, it was more of a 'when in Rome' type of deal…" He trailed off and took another bite of toast.

"Yes!" said Lance. "That's the kind of response I was looking for! What were you in Alaska for?"

Keith shook his head, mouth full. He swallowed it down before responding. "Nope. You asked me a question, so I get to ask you something first."

Lance felt the smile as it spread across his face. As stoic as he tried to come off, his partner was joining in on the game. "Quid pro quo, Doctor Lecter," he said, taking a bite of his sausage.

"Okay," said Keith. He paused for a moment, thinking, and asked "Do you have any siblings?"

"Going right to the personal stuff?" Lance stabbed another bit of egg with his fork. "Yeah, a few. Older sister, younger sister, two younger brothers."

"Big family."

"I guess so," said Lance, mouth full of egg. "So, tell me about Alaska."

"it was when I was working with violent crimes," said Kogane. "Someone had been finding people who lived up north—way up north, and finding them when they were all alone, killing them, and making it look like the deaths were accidents, just the hazards of living above the arctic circle alone.

"There was one whose skull was beaten in before the attacker pushed a snowmobile over on top of him, and another who had been stabbed before the killer dragged her body into the caribou migration path, to make it seem like she'd been trampled."

"Jesus."

"Yeah," said Keith. "And the killer did a bad job of covering it up, but it didn't matter because these people were like hermits, living isolated in the cold. It was sometimes months before these bodies were discovered?"

"Did you catch the killer?" Lance had totally ignored his breakfast at this point, engrossed in Keith's story. Keith took a sip of his coffee.

"After I ask a question," he said. Then, in an eerie imitation of Anthony Hopkins: "Quid pro quo, _Clarice_ …" Lance shivered and Kogane grinned. "Where did you grow up?"

"West Virginia," said Lance in a terrible accent, "where my daddy was sheriff, till he was shot and I moved to the sheep farm, and the lambs would _scream_ …"

"Easy there, Jodie Foster," said Kogane.

"Sorry." Lance kept that wide, shiteating grin, though. "Small town in Arizona. Nice place, if kind of boring." He shrugged. "Did you get your man?"

"Sort of," said Keith. "We had been tracking him for a few weeks when the local sheriff got a call for help from a compound about twenty miles out.

"We headed out, and I remember it was _snowing_ , so we took a Snow Cat, and it was so _slow_ …"

"And…?"

"When we got there, our guy was unconscious and wrapped up in a few rolls of duct tape. He's tried to attack a single woman who focused mainly on hunting and fishing. What he'd not taken into consideration was her sister, who'd been up on a week-long visit from Juneau." He took a sip of his coffee to punctuate the end of his story.

"Wow," said Lance. "Why'd he do it?"

"Boredom. Insanity. I'm not really sure." He looked down and away. "I think he was just a sociopath, but he blamed the weird nights and days, where it's all day and all night sun and then the opposite." He shook his head. "But I think he just liked to get away with it. Power trip, a rush, something like that."

Lance took another bite of hash browns, even though he wasn't particularly hungry anymore.

"Ever had any pets?" asked Kogane.

"Yes!" said Lance. "Cats, all while I was growing up." He swallowed a mouthful of potatoes. "I haven't had one of my own since college, though—none of my apartments have allowed pets."

Keith nodded and poked at his eggs with his fork. Lance nearly asked him about his own experience with pets, but figured he should start with his _human_ family. "Do _you_ have any siblings?"

Kogane visibly stiffened, his hand tight around his cup of coffee. He exhaled a breath through his nose and looked away. "N—um, I pass."

"You can't pass, come on."

"I'm passing."

"Fine," said Lance, pushing the last of his eggs into his mouth. He actually had to chew a bit before continuing. "I get it. I haven't reached that level where I unlock your tragic backstory." He swallowed his food. "So, okay, tell me why you're so interested in this paranormal, conspiracy theory stuff."

Kogane pushed his plate away from him and stood up from the booth. "Sorry, Doctor Lecter, game's over." He walked away from the table, toward the cashier to pay.

"I'm Clarice!" said Lance, half-shouting after him. " _You're_ Lecter! And _hey_!"

Kogane didn't turn around, and Lance felt a heat in his chest. Sure, it had been a silly game, but _he'd_ answered truthfully to all of the questions Kogane had posed, and the ones he'd asked weren't all that different. But Keith was too cool and mysterious for it, for the dumb little game.

Maybe it was because he thought Lance was reporting to someone about him—which, to be fair, he was—or maybe it had been his pride and persona. Either way, Lance felt a little cheated out of the game. He realized that he hadn't, as he had originally intended, gotten much information about his partner, only where he had investigated on a previous case. Kogane had dodged the _big_ question. Lance took another, big bite of hash browns, which he now realized he wasn't going to be able to finish, if his partner was already leaving. Which was great, just another reason to be angry and annoyed. He scarfed down another few mouthfuls of potato and got up to get in line at the register, still chewing as he did.

10

They decided in the car that Lance would work with Gunderson to find out what might have been going on astronomically while Keith would ask around in Karin's tiny downtown to see if anyone knew about what might have happened to the space rocks. Keith called ahead to Pidge, and a few minutes later, he was dropping Lance off on the side of the road near Pidge's house.

"Be cool, though," warned Lance as he stepped out of the car.

"Cool?"

"Yeah, not all 'in your face about aliens' and stuff. Don't weird people out."

"I _don't_ weird people out." His eyes narrowed.

"…okay."

Pidge's house was out by the edge of town, peripheral to the desert. "Call me when you want me to pick you up," said Keith, and Lance gave him a wave before he drove away.

Lance walked up to the house and was about to knock on the ranch-style house's front door when he saw a flash through the garage door windows. He walked over to the door next to the garage and knocked there, instead of the front door. Pidge glanced through the window on the door before undoing two deadbolts and opening it for Lance. "You're alone, right?" they asked.

"Yeah," said Lance, and stepped inside. Pidge locked it behind him, and moved past Lance to lead him to the garage, where Hunk was standing over a semi-finished cage like structure with a welding mask on. He flipped it up when Lance and Pidge entered the garage.

"Agent McClain!" he exclaimed. "Coming back for more weirdness, I see."

"I _hope_ now," said Lance, shrugging off his jacket. "I hope we can figure out some more _facts_."

Hunk shrugged. "Sure."

"What are you building? Some kind of trap?"

Hunk let out a loud, booming laugh. "Trap? No, I—"

"He found instructions on how to make a hovercraft with a vacuum engine on the internet," said Pidge. "He figures—"

"I can make it even more powerful with a larger engine. Like from a big lawnmower or something." Hunk patted the steel frame he was working on. "Just have to build the structure to cage it…"

"Cool," said Lance, and it was. Pidge had said Hunk was the engineer, but Lance had figured that had meant only with weird devices to detect ectoplasmic energy or something. _This_ was almost a normal hobby. A cool application of engineering know-how.

"So, Agent McClain," said Pidge, sitting in front of a desktop computer setup near the back of the garage. Lance started around Hunk's project to get to them, sitting in an old folding chair in front of the monitors, next to Pidge. They pulled up a few graphs from their cluttered desktop. "I have all of the information from the meteor shower here."

Lance scanned over the charts: altitudes, velocities, coordinates in a plane Pidge had somehow set up using that data and a relative position of the earth—Dr. Gunderson knew what they were doing. There was just one thing that bothered Lance.

"How did you gather this information?" he asked.

"I was going to _show_ you yesterday," said Pidge, adjusting their glasses, but with the meteorites missing and all, it just never really happened. We were too preoccupied with worrying about that."

"And I got to lug that _box_ all the way back to the car for nothing!" Hunk glared from the other side of the garage, where he was carefully putting away his blowtorch.

"Yeah, yeah…" said Pidge, waving him away. They turned back to the display, pointing to the familiar piece of equipment under the desk. "That thing uses radar and infrared, paired with a couple of high-altitude drones designed—"

" _You're welcome_!"

"—to create a field, or, up, digital grid, that I can then pinpoint and track sub-orbital bodies with." Pidge leaned back in their chair.

"That's—wow." Lance looked down at the unassuming box and to the graphs again. "That's amazing. And you're sure it's accurate?"

Pidge's brows lowered. "Are you doubting my work? We designed and tested it. It works." He turned to the computer and tapped in some commands. "Sure, the research hasn't ever been _replicated_ , but I haven't exactly made the technology _public_ …" They trailed off.

"That's—I'm sorry, I just…" Lance scrambled. "You're really smart."

Pidge flashed a sly grin. "You bet your _ass_ I'm smart."

Lance leaned in and squinted at the list of values in the charts and compared it to some of the graphs. They all matched up, which made sense, but…

"This meteor shower didn't start outside of the earth's orbit," said Lance.

"Well," said Pidge, "we can only measure sub-orbitally. The drones can't reach to speech, though I _wish_ …"

"No, no," said Lance, pointing to the graph on the screen. "Look, here, the way the objects are decelerating _horizontally_. They couldn't have entered the atmosphere at that angle, at their size, and be traveling across the sky at that velocity…"

"Are you sure?" asked Pidge, looking closer at the numbers.

"I mean, I'm just eyeballing it, but those numbers don't match up with something falling from orbit, or anywhere outside of the atmosphere."

"What does that mean?" asked Hunk, suddenly behind Lance. Lance only jumped in his seat an inch or two, and hoped the other two hadn't noticed.

"I-it means that either this meteor shower came from some sort of a sub-orbital structure," said Lance, "like a plane, a drone, or a weather balloon…" Both Hunk and Pidge rolled their eyes.

"What?"

"A weather balloon?" said Pidge. "Seriously?"

"In our line of work, man, it's _never_ a weather balloon."

Lane turned back to the screen, scanning over the numbers again and wondered, just a tiny wonder, if they could be right.

* * *

 **Fox Mulder** : I've seen too many things not to believe

 **Scully** : I've seen things, too. But there are answers to be found now. We have hope that there's a place to start. That's what I believe.

 **Fox Mulder** : [ _sighing_ ] You put such faith in your science, Scully, but... from the things I've seen, science provides no place to start.

 **Scully** : Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that's a place to start. That's where the hope is.


	4. Proof

**Proof**

* * *

Hello everyone! Sorry it's taken so long to update-I'm back in school now, and I find it hard to find time to write because of my eleven hour days and stuff. SO it took a while, but it's here!

IF you want to hear the playlist I listen to while I'm writing this, or want some cool jams on your own that are the Voltron/X-Files aesthetic, you can find that on 8tracks with the same title as this fic!

* * *

 **Mulder** : You think that believing is easy?

* * *

11

Lance would have been lying to himself and to others if he didn't admit that he _loved_ that he had made progress on their case while Keith had not. Keith had asked many of the local business owners and some people actually open their doors for him about the meteor shower, but all of them either hadn't seen it, told him they didn't want whatever he was selling, or told him to go fuck himself—though more commonly, the outcome was a combination of these.

Keith had been annoyed that Lance had learned more than he had, and externally showed that, but Lance caught him excitedly going through his notes in their hotel room that night; Lance's development supported Keith's theory of alien involvement, no matter how far-fetched that sounded.

While Keith seemed pretty sure about what the debris was, Lance was interested because that fact that the debris came from inside the atmosphere, from below the earth's orbit, made it easier for him to find things that weren't space ships from alien planets that could fit the profile of the pieces. For something to have fallen from inside of the atmosphere and kept its original shape made sense. And if this was from an airplane or, though Pidge and Hunk would vehemently disagree, a weather balloon, they would be able to concretely close the case and move on.

They laid in their beds, Keith flipping through his case notes again. Lance had his laptop open in front of him, and he clicked around the local airport's website, searching for a contact number he could call to inquire about missing parts and documented flight paths for the past couple of days.

He found a number and punched it into his cell phone, saving it for later. He'd call in the morning, and _hopefully_ find out exactly what had gone on with this case. He turned to his partner, who had moved on to some extra files Pidge had given them with data from the meteor shower—or, rather, _supposed_ meteor shower, now that they knew that the debris originated from within the atmosphere.

Lance glanced at the Word icon on his desktop, and wondered again what Keith would think if he _knew_ he was reporting back on him. Keith hadn't brought up the subject again, but Lance didn't think he had dropped the notion. Lance's mind flashed back to the late-night phone call he had made to Assistant Director Ross the night before. After the things they'd found today, he wondered if that phone call was nothing more than Keith's paranoia washing off on him. He hoped that sort of impression wouldn't reflect negatively on him in Ross's eyes—this _was_ his first case, no matter how ridiculous it was, and he wanted all of his superiors to see how well he could do.

"So, Kogane," said Lance, leaning over on his side to face his partner, "what happens if we _do_ find that there are aliens?"

Keith raised an eyebrow and carefully put the file down on the bed next to him, to save his spot. "I guess we'll file the appropriate paperwork, and move on to the next case."

"Wait—so if we prove the existence of aliens," said Lance, immediately holding up his hands defensively. "And I'm not saying that we _will_ , that's a pretty big 'if…'" Keith narrowed his eyes. "But we'll just move on to the next thing?"

"You want to keep chasing aliens?" asked Keith.

"No, I just…"

"Lance, I've got a pile of cases like this one that'll bring us closer to the truth of what's going on, extra-terrestrially. And if we can prove the existence of aliens with this case, we'll have more _help_ next time, more believers…" He looked away.

"You want to just keep at it," said Lance.

"Yeah, I do!" snapped Keith. "And I want people to believe me, okay? To listen to me again!"

He was sitting upright, breaking hard after his outburst, and Lance didn't push him again. Keith's brows lowered over his eyes and he looked back to the file he was reading. Lance's eyes lingered on him for a moment before returning to his laptop. His cursor lingered over the Word button once more, but instead he closed the laptop and pushed it to the side of the bed, and leaned back into his pillows. He sighed, and breathed heavily through his nose.

12

He was awoken around 3 AM by the incessant buzzing of his phone on the bed next to him. He pushed it slightly away from him at first, as if that would stop the noise and vibration, but then woke up with a jolt. He scrambled for it before it could get annoying enough to wake his partner. He thumbed the green "answer" button and slipped out of bed as quietly as he could. He padded to the door, not bothering to put on his shoes, and undid the chain lock before sliding through the door into the parking lot beyond.

He lifted the phone to his ear, but he didn't say anything until he had closed the door carefully behind him and walked across the cool pavement to the empty payphone hub, so he wasn't right next to the door where he might be audible to his sleeping partner.

"Assistant Director Ross?" he said, finally.

A gruff voice answered him. "Agent McClain."

"I'm sorry, I was asleep…"

"I don't care," replied the assistant director shortly. "Your partner was asleep, I figure."

"Yeah—yes, he was. Is." Lance case a glance back at the door, which hadn't moved since he'd shut it.

"Good." A pause. "I don't know the names of the people who took the information you reported to me," said the Assistant Director, his voice hushed. "But I know that they did _not_ like that I was asking about it."

Lance didn't respond to this, but instead shifted his position, leaning against the empty payphone. He sighed and rubbed his face before moving his hand upward to run his fingers back through his hair.

"McClain? I'm not going to dig anymore for you." Ross paused. "I don't know what they were interested in your case for, or why they would care about some fallen space rock at all. But, I will say, someone is, and they don't want to be known."

"You aren't the least bit interested in _why_ they want to know?"

"McClain, you sound like your partner."

Lance's brows lowered and he shot back "I don't—"

"I have to do my best to protect myself and my agents," said Ross, cutting Lance off. "While I'm sure you'll get to the root of this business, this is your case to solve."

"Yes, sir," said Lance, his eyes drifting upward to the stars.

There was a pause on the other end of the line, as if Ross had something else to say, but then the line went dead. Lance held the phone to his ear another couple of seconds more before lowering his hand to his side.

Lance breathed outward as he leaned back against the telephone box and let his head fall backward so his face pointed to the sky. He closed his eyes and let what Ross had just said sink into his brain. There _was_ someone who wanted to know about what they were doing. There _was_ someone who thought this was important enough to not only follow what they were doing, but deliberately interrupt their process in order to sabotage their findings. There _was_ something they weren't supposed to know.

He realized that made him want to know, more than ever before, what the hell was going on in Cairn. He wanted to know, more than ever, what these fallen pieces of debris were, and why they were so important.

He opened his eyes to the stars just in time to see a white streak across them. He blinked, and another tiny streak appeared beside it. It took him a moment to realize _what_ exactly he was seeing, but once he did, he turned back to the motel room and banged his fist against the door. Only after a few raps did Keith open the door. His face was flat and his eyes were wide.

"What?"

Lance stepped out of the way, and Keith stepped past him into the parking lot. Lance pointed upward, and Keith's eyes locked on the streaks.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked Keith. "That's…"

"Another shower," said Lance.

The debris, whatever it was, sparked up in flames as it hurtled to the ground, and landed with a slight impact not too far outside the horizon built by the low buildings of the town. Both agents stared at the fain t smoky trails in the sky before turning to teach other and seeing the realization in each other's eyes.

They had a hard time getting back into the motel room, because they both tried to enter through the door at the same time, and found themselves a little stuck until Keith pushed himself all the way through, Lance stumbling in after him.

13

They pulled off into the desert, the tires of their rental car sending puffs of dark dust up behind them, a soft, dark purple in the receding glow of their taillights. Lance was behind the wheel, and glancing to his partner, he realized this was the first time Kogane had actually ridden shotgun in his car. Judging by the gritted teeth and white-knuckled teeth on the handle above the passenger door, Kogane was taking the bumpy ride as well as Lance would have expected.

They trundled through the night, the headlights bouncing off of various scrubs, rocks, and cacti off to the sides of the road. For a short, panicked second or two, Lance wasn't sure if he was still on the road anymore, that he had lost it in the dark, but when he didn't actually run into anything, he figured he was okay.

"Up ahead!" said Kogane, using his non-gripping hand to point at a spot of haze a few dozen feet ahead of them, where some dust and smoke lazed in the air.

Lance slammed on the brakes and trusted the wheel at the same time, bringing the car to an abrupt stop just off of the side of the road and lifting it up onto its two drivers-side wheels at just enough of an angle to make Keith nervous—and Lance could see the beads of sweat on his face—before settling out and coming to a rest. Lance was unbuckled and halfway out of the car before he even got his keys out of the ignition. Keith was right behind him, after disingenuously staggering out of the passenger side.

Lance waved his hand in front of his face as he approached the dirty fog in an attempt to clear it from where his eyes and nose would be. It didn't really make much of a difference.

"Do you see anything?" asked Lance. Keith was covering his nose and mouth with a sleeve. "I wish we brought a flash…"

He was cut off as Keith help up his cell phone, the flash ignited as a result of the built-in flashlight app. He aimed it in Lance's eyes briefly before pointing it forward, into the smoky dust. They still could see much other than the faint particulates, standing out against the flash's incandescence in the desert light.

The moved forward slowly, their eyes picking over the gradually more visible sandy desert ground. The flashlight began to pick up more of the imperfections in the sand's surface, and they walked side-by-side, their eyes down, scanning for any indication of anything irregular. Lance bumped into Keith's shoulder, and Keith's eyes flicked to him and back to the sand. Lance held up a hand by way of apology, but didn't say anything. The dust in the air seemed not only to dampen their vision, but cloud their hearing as well. Everything was quiet, and the smooth sand seemed to be endless below their eyes.

"Wait," said Keith, breaking the silence. He took two steps forward and knelt down, shifting some of the sand out of the way. As he did, he took the flashlight with him, and Lance shivered. Even though the desert did nothing but absorb the sun all day, here, in the dark, it was cold. That was something he'd forgotten. He knelt down next to his partner a little bit more quickly than he would like to admit to himself, bringing himself back into the glow of the flashlight again.

When he got there, Keith was hovering his fingers an inch or two above something in the sand. Lance leaned in a little closer. "What is it?"

"This is _it_ ," said Keith. He moved his hand back, adjusting so that Lance could see the shape in the sand.

The piece had a bit of a warmth around it, a heat that seemed to radiate outward. It was a clump of what seemed to be circuit board and metal, a twisted piece of _something_ mechanical, about five inches across. It looked familiar, just like—

"The meteor fragments," said Keith. "This is a new one, just like them, and it…"

"Okay," said Lance. "Okay, so there was another event, and this is what we found." He reached a hand out toward it, but then pulled it back. He didn't want to contaminate the scene with his fingerprints. Plus, there was no telling how hot the thing was, after falling through the atmosphere as it did. "Are there any other pieces?

"There _should_ be, right?"

"Yes," said Lance, "based on the size of the fireball…"

Keith took another look at the chunk of fallen rock and stood up, taking the light with him. "Okay," he said. "Let's find them, then. We need to figure out how many pieces there are. So we can put this thing together. Figure out what is going on."

Lance raised an eyebrow as he stood up. He wouldn't have thought Kogane would have reacted this well to what was going on. He'd have figured Kogane would have just started grabbing pieces of the meteorite—or whatever it was—and talking about how they were pieces of alien technology, or something as similarly ridiculous. Lance had to remind himself that Kogane was a well-experienced field operative for the bureau first, and a conspiracy theorist second. He knew the procedure. He had that cool, collected way of dealing with things that Lance knew he should have given a bit more credence to.

"We'll have to get a forensics team out here tomorrow," said Lance, scanning around outside of Keith's beam of light, trying to pinpoint any irregularities in the darkness. "I know that you're worried about people knowing about this, but we're going to have to have some official analysts, not just the illuminati we've been working with."

"That doesn't make sense. The illuminati would have been the thing they're looking for, not the group—"

Keith cut off when he saw the headlights. He froze in his spot, and Lance looked to his face, which seemed to have lost all of its color, even in the low light.

"What—?" Lance began to ask when Keith extinguished his cell phone light, plunging them into darkness. Lance's heartbeat quickened as he realized he could not see anything at all. His eyes ad adjusted to the low light of the flashlight's periphery, but had not adapted to the more complete darkness of pure night. He pinpointed the headlights in the distance and used them to get his bearings. He could hear a scuffle of Keith moving around, but didn't want to move himself until his eyes adjusted.

The headlights were getting closer, and they were getting closer _quickly_. Lance stared at them for a moment before Keith grabbed his arm and pulled him backward.

Hey!" said Lance. "What are you doing?"

"Who knows who's coming?" said Keith.

"It's probably Shirogane and Pidge and Hunk…"

"Probably, but we also know we're not the only ones looking for these rocks."

"Oh, but—"

Keith tugged Lance over a small dune and pulled him down to lie on his stomach. He pointed to where the headlights were coming up the site and shutting off, leaving the whole area in a near-total darkness again. Lance started to say something, and Keith clapped his hand over his mouth. He narrowed his eyes, and Lance rolled his own. He considered sticking his tongue out to make Kogane remove his hand, but he removed it on his own before he got the chance.

They watched, Lance squinting his eyes to see, as a few figures moved from the car to the place where the debris had landed, scanning the ground with flashlights and occasionally stooping down to pick things up from the sand. Lance could feel Keith tense up next to him, and he broke his stare at the men in the mysterious car to look at his partner for a moment. His teeth were gritted, and whatever color that had left his face before was back, his face flushing with color even in the dreary light. Lance glanced down at the way Keith's fists clenched and unclenched, and placed his hand on Keith's back. Keith looked to McClain, who just left his hand there between Kogane's shoulderbades as a reassurance. Keith's eyebrows pointed together and he turned back to the people stealing their evidence. They worked quickly, methodically.

They had been working for about a minute before another set of headlines appeared in the night, starting small but growing steadily. The figures rooting through the sand noticed these immediately and, making sure they'd taken what they needed to, and re-entered their car, pulling away into the night without turning their headlights back on. Lance could hear Keith take in a sharp breath and hold it as they pulled close to where the rental car was parked, but they didn't stop, so he was able to release his breath. While Keith bristled over the strangers absconding with the pieces, Lance moved his eyes to the approaching car. It seemed like this empty stretch of desert was getting more than its normal share of traffic this night.

The car, a larger SUV, pulled up next to the rental car and shuddered into lifelessness, the headlights staying on, pointed at the site where the pieces of debris had struck the earth. The doors opened and out stepped Hunk from the driver's side, followed by Pidge in the passenger seat and Shiro from the back seat. They walked toward the place where the debris had made its impact, and Lance stepped forward from their hiding spot, Keith standing right behind. He brushed the sand that stuck to the front of his jacket and entered the area illuminated by the headlights.

They didn't say anything when they met, all of them looking down to the scuffled, disturbed sand below them. Pidge knelt down, and Hunk turned to scan the horizon, where the car might have disappeared. Keith turned to Shiro. "We're being watched. Someone is covering this up, intentionally."

Shiro nodded, and Lance stepped forward. "What do we do, then? We have proof that something's here, and that someone doesn't want us to know about it. What next?"

"We can start with this," said Keith, fumbling around in his jacket pocket for a moment before retrieving a five-inch squarish section of the debris. It was pock-marked with little indentations and smaller details that indicated where it might connect to other parts of machinery.

"That's as good a place to start as any," said Shiro, and his eyes trailed from the piece of debris to Lance. "So—what are your thoughts on this _now_?"

Lance hesitated for a moment before answering him, feeling the eyes of the entire group probing him as he looked back at Shirogane. "I—I don't know."

Keith raised an eyebrow. "Good," he said. "So let's figure it out." His hand clasped around the chunk of debris, and the rest of the group nodded in unison in the dark of the night.

* * *

 **Cigarette Smoking Man** : What's the truth, Agent Mulder?

* * *

Again, thanks so much for reading! I've got a lot more stewing in my brain, so there should be more coming as soon as I find time to write it!


	5. Documents

**Fox Mulder** : Go ahead.  
 **Dana Scully** : No, you go ahead.  
 **Fox Mulder** : No, no, no. Be my guest.  
 **Fox Mulder** : I know how much you like snapping on the latex.

* * *

14

Special Agent Lance McClain still wasn't completely convinced of the existence of extra-terrestrials.

He was, however, convinced that there was more going on here than just the delusions of his wild theorist partner.

They had returned to the room after the desert, but Lance was pretty sure that neither of them had really slept much. Keith was gone just after dawn to meet up with Shirogane and the others to examine the piece of debris, which Kogane had practically _spooned_ all night long. Lance had opted to try for another hour of sleep he didn't catch, and after getting coffee from the gas station next door, went to the motel office and called for a cab to give him a lift to what he was mentally referring to as "the lab."

Lance used this time to try to come up with an alternate explanation for the debris, but by the time Pidge let him in through the side door to the garage, he still hadn't come up with anything.

He braced himself as he entered through the door by the garage, stepping by Pidge, but he wasn't sure he was ready for the explanation Keith and Shiro had come up with during his absence.

"Agent McClain, I'm glad you're here," said Shirogane, meeting him by the door and ushering him toward the computer screens. "Keith—Agent Kogane—and I have found…"

From behind them, Pidge cleared their throat. Shiro nodded apologetically. "Excuse me, _Pidge_ was an instrumental part of the operation."

Lance sighed, turning back toward the computers, where his partner was waiting, his sleeves rolled up and his jacket folded over the back of his chair. "What've you got?"

"So," said Keith, his eyebrows lowering on his eyes, "we've analyzed the chemical makeup of this piece of…"

Pidge cleared their throat as they brushed past Lance, grabbing his coffee out of his hands as they went. "I think you mean _I_ analyzed the chemical makeup…" They took a sip of Lance's coffee, scrunched up their face, spit the coffee back into the cup, and handed it back to Lance. "A little less cream next time, bud." They patted Lance on the shoulder.

"Dr. Gunderson analyzed it, excuse me," said Keith, turning from Pidge back to Lance. "And what we found was… unusual."

"Unusual how?" asked Lance.

"Exactly!" said Keith. His eyes were lit up, and he leaned forward a bit, elbows propped on his knees, as he continued to explain. "At first, nothing seemed to be strange. Normal metals and stuff you'd expect in a piece of machinery. Then, there's a slight pulse. Something else."

"What?"

"There's the question," said Shirogane, gesturing to Lance with his prosthetic while pointing to the computer screens with his other hand. "We don't know what it is. It's nothing that's ever been observed on Earth before."

Lance tried to make his eyeroll seem less obvious than it actually was. Keith pointed to the screen. "Look. It's right here. We can't seem to place the material. And it seems to help keep the thing, whatever it was, together."

"It did it a lot of help when it fractured in the atmosphere or on impact," said Lance, his eyes scanning over the numbers and figures on the screen. They seemed to check out.

"That's the thing," said Keith. "And please, don't dismiss this right away—what if the same people who came to collect last night…" He trailed off, losing his words for just a moment before catching them again. "…what if _they_ had a hand in taking it down in the first place?"

"It would explain why they wanted to cover it up so efficiently…"

"But it would also mean that whoever they were, they know that this was coming in advance."

Lance raised an eyebrow. "So you're saying…" He felt a vibration in his pocket, and pulled out his cell phone. One glance at the caller ID, and he took a step back from Keith and Shiro. "Sorry, I've to take this call…"

He backed away from the others, still clutching his coffee in one hand, and stepped out of the garage into the hallway that connected it to the rest of the house. He could see from there Hunk working in the kitchen, washing dishes, which explained why Lance hadn't already seen him in the garage.

He stepped into a side room and closed the door behind him, finally answering the call. A familiar, gruff voice met him from the other side of the line.

"McClain, I don't often have to wait for the fifth ring for someone to pick up," said Assistant Director Ross through the phone.

"I'm sorry, sir, I…"

"Yeah, I don't care," he grunted. "Listen, I don't know what you're doing out there, but you're causing trouble."

"What?" asked Lance, hunching over the phone a bit.

"Nothing big, or stated explicitly, but let's just say, I'm getting a lot of pressure to bring you back into the garrison." He paused. "Listen: I don't know what you're doing down there, but it seems like it might be important." Lance glanced at the door in the small, dark room, and closed his eyes, nodding. "I can't be a part of it. There are people who want me to reign you in, and they aren't _asking_ , if you understand me."

Lance thought he could hear a waver in he man's rough voice. He nodded, realized he was in a phone conversation, and said, "Yes, sir."

"So I'm officially telling you to stop working on this case," he said, his voice almost mechanical. A brief pause, and then a string of numbers; "5551103." He paused again. "You'll come back," he said, as if he hadn't just listed off a string of numbers, "with all of the _facts_." He stressed the last word in a way that just sounded unnatural. Lance ran through the umber in his head once more, making sure he hadn't lost the rapid-fire digits.

"Yes, sir," said Lance, repeating to himself the digits, in his head.

"Remember, McClain. The _facts_."

The phone clicked off, and Lance held it to his ear soundlessly before lowering it from his face. He slid his phone back into his pocket, and he leaned back against the wall.

Ross had said to shut down the investigation, but, judging by his tone and that string of numbers, he had meant something else entirely. He was just covering his butt, which meant…

 _Someone's got the Assistant Director under surveillance_. That mean that whatever this thing was, it was way over his head. He glanced around the room he had closed himself into for the first time. It was a laundry room, a washer and dryer against the back wall. A basket of dirty clothes sat in front of the washer. A cross from where Lance was leaning was a cabinet, underneath which was a drying rack.

It wasn't the drying rack or the cabinet that caught Lance's attention, though, it was the spiraled cord that hung down from an old phone someone had stored on top of the cabinet.

Assistant Director Ross had asked for the facts. _But he hadn't, had he?_ thought Lance. No, he had pronounced it just right so that Lance could make the connection.

 _The fax_.

15

After some quick and frankly pretty unconvincing excuses to his partner, Shiro, Hunk, and Pidge, Lance left the garage to "go check up on something real quick."

He had then walked as quickly as he could without power walking down the street to Cairn's main part of town. He was lucky that though it was a small town in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, it still had a Post Office. It was the only place he could really think of that would have a working fax machine in this town.

He opened the front door and found that the inside of the Post Office was just as hot and dry as the outside. Lance dropped his coffee in the trash by the door—he didn't need any more diuretic than the heat, causing him to sweat under his jacket. He approached the counter, where a single woman was waiting for a customer. She was probably in her mid-fifties, and the heat didn't seem to bother her in her neatly pressed uniform.

"Good morning," said Lance, raising his hand in greeting.

"Morning," said the woman, looking to him but not returning his smile.

"I was just hoping to use your fax machine…"

"Okay. I'll need the cover page on top, the others below, and a number for the other fax. It'll be five cents a page, not counting the cover page, on both outgoing and incoming." She sounded as if she were a robot, with a mechanical and rehearsed efficiency.

Lance stopped and hesitated. "Oh. Okay, yeah. Can I, um, borrow some paper and a pen?"

The woman on the other side of the counter raised one eyebrow but turned to the die, gathered two pieces of printer paper and a ballpoint pen, and slid them across the counter to Lance.

"Thanks," said Lance. He first scribbled the string of numbers at the top right of one of the papers: _5551103_. Then, he wrote in quick, block handwriting:

To: Garrison  
Fr: Blue

His next page, he scribbled in quick handwriting in the center of the page:

What?

Lance turned to the postal worker and offered an uneasy grin. "What's the return number?"

The woman looked to Lance with such disinterest Lance thought it was weird that she looked up at all. The apathy her expression carried almost _scared_ Lance. "555-7031," she said.

"Thanks," said Lance, scribbling the number on the cover sheet and handing both of the papers across the counter to the woman. "And if there could be _private_ , uh…" He fumbled to the sweaty inside of his jacket to find his badge, which he flashed to the woman. "This is all strictly confidential."

She raised one eyebrow attain. "Okay, hun," she said, turning from him to a small fax machine and punching in the number sending them through with a creaking and shuffling set of noises that made Lance wonder how _old_ the fax machine was. Of course, the fact that it was a fax machine at all spoke to that.

A moment later, the machine came to a rest. The postal worker picked the papers from the tray and passed them across the counter to Lance. "That'll be a nickel. I'm assuming you're waiting for a response?"

"I think so, yeah," said Lance, folding the papers and tucking them into the pocket of his jacket where he kept his badge. As he did, the fax machine behind the counter came to life, beginning to print. "That was quick, eh?" asked Lance, a grin on his face.

His grin was not returned. She waited another moment for the printing to cease—it was more than several pages—and paged through them briefly before handing them over to Lance. "That'll be seventy-five cents."

Lance pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to her. She was ready with a quarter practically before he had handed her a bill. Lance nodded, took the papers, and took a step away from her. Then, he stopped and turned back to her, using the pen to scribble his name and phone number on the corner of one of the papers and handing it to the woman at the counter. "If anything else comes in for me, please call me right away."

The woman looked to him before looking at the paper slip and putting it next to the fax machine.

"Thanks," said Lance, hurrying out of the Post Office, papers in hand and Kogane's number half-dialed already.

16

Keith joined Lance a little after Lance had gotten to the diner, and Lance had already ordered coffee for the both of them. Keith had something resembling a scowl on his face.

He slid into the booth. "Alright, McClain, why couldn't you have just come back to where I already was? We were in the middle of—"

"We're off of the case."

"What?"

Lance sighed, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. "I got a call from Assistant Director Ross this morning. After what we'd found already, he found out that someone _else_ , someone high-up, was also interested in this, and keenly interested in keeping us _away_ from it. I think they _threatened_ him, and he officially put us off of the case."

Keith's eyebrows came together in anger, but Lance held up his hands before his partner could speak. "But don't worry. Kind of. He _did_ give me _this_." He slid the small stack of papers across the table to Keith. Keith looked to Lance, his eyes narrowed, and picked up the papers to investigate them closer.

"This is…"

"Someone high-up," said Lance, "and I don't know how high—hell, I don't even know if their position in the government even actually _exists_ —wants whatever we found in the desert. And they want us _desperately_ to not find it."

Keith didn't say anything. He paged through the papers, the typed-out pages of information. They detailed vaguely-worded assignments to New Mexico, around the same time as when they had left DC to investigate the crashes.

"Do you think that this means we'll have to report back…?" Lance trailed off, and Keith met his eyes as they fell downward.

"Officially? Yes," said Keith. His eyes flitted back to the papers for a moment before returning to Lance. "But, I know I haven't taken many vacation days yet this year."

A grin pulled at Lance's cheek. "I guess I'll have to call mine in a little early."

Keith's face held a grin now, too. "Stress of the first case, and all." He turned back to the documents as Lance took another sip of his coffee.

The waitress came to the booth and dispensed some more coffee into Lance's mug. Keith seemed to notice his own mug for the first time and began to drink from it as the waitress walked away, his eyes still poring over the documents in his hand.

"With these, we'll take the next step. We can figure out what it is about this that the people in that car didn't want us to know," said Lance, gesturing excitedly with his hands as he spoke. "And then we can…"

Keith stopped mid-sip and practically slammed the cup of coffee down on the table, splashing a few droplets over onto its laminated surface. He shook the paper he was holding at Lance. "This!"

"What?" asked Lance. He reached for the paper, but Keith jerked back, gesturing to it all the same.

"It says right here: 'Agents dispatched regarding new developments in the Kerberos Program at…' Then there are the coordinates of the first impact site." He looked from the papers to Lance. "The Kerberos Program."

"Shirogane's old program."

"Do you know what this means?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Everything he's said is true." Keith paused, looking down to the papers again, as if to confirm what he was reading. "I mean, I didn't doubt him, but I mean, this is _proof_."

"Keith, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves," said Lance. "I mean, it could be connected to the original research mission or the spacecraft or—any number of things."

Keith shook his head. "This," he tapped the paper with the middle finger of the hand not holding it, "is what we need to follow up on. Because we have the most credible—newly credible, thanks to this leak, but still totally credible—source."

"Keith, I don't think we…" said Lance, catching Keith's arm as he got up to leave the booth, bushing back against the table as he did.

"We're _going_ to do this," said Keith, turning back to Lance with his eyebrows low over his eyes, "because I've been right every sept of the way on this case, and all you've been doing is reporting back to Ross, the higher-ups who are fighting us over this, and God knows who else." His eyes, cold, lingered on Lance for another moment before yanking his arm away from Lance's grip and stalking toward the exit.

"Oh yeah?" asked Lance, calling out after his partner. "Well, you've been reporting to…" He paused for a moment, thinking. "…someone else! I bet…"

Keith didn't turn back to face Lance, though a few of the other patrons of the diner did. Lance held up a hand to all of them, in apology for the small spat, and sat back at his table. He stared at the papers left on the table for a moment before picking up his coffee and draining the rest of it. Keith's voice ran through his mind, something he had said to Lance on their first day together. "They just sent you here to spy on me. They think I'm crazy." He had denied it then, but it really was true. And now that he couldn't report back—to the bureau, the case was closed—what was his position? How could Kogane _trust_ him to do his part in the rest of this investigation into whatever it was they were investigating? He sighted, and when the waitress came to refill his coffee, he instead asked for the check.

* * *

 **The Cigarette Smoking Man** : Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.


	6. Kerberos

_A/N: Okay, let me just tell you-this was a hard chapter to write. It's way different from the rest of the fic, and it's fricken LONG. Like, 4000 words longer than any other chapter long. It's an important part of the story, and it deviates a bit from the slower pace, so buckle up!_

* * *

 **Kerberos**

* * *

 _ **Jose Chung** : For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all... alone._

* * *

17

The inside of Shirogane's house was almost eerily normal, like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. When they wat around his small kitchen table, little notepad out in front of both agents and Keith's phone between them and Shiro, set to record, it seemed almost as if they were about to have a perfectly normal conversation. Keith pressed a button on the phone's recording app and sat back in his chair, nodding to Shirogane as he did. Lance noted for the first time, as Shiro nodded back, just how _deep_ the scar across the bridge of his nose seemed to be.

"This is Special Agent Keith Kogane, accompanied by my partner, Agent Lance McClain…" He didn't even turn his eyes toward Lance, but Lance didn't really expect him to. "…and we will be speaking with Takashi Shirogane about his experience in the Kerberos Project." He gestured across the table. "Shio, identify yourself for the record."

"Of course." Shiro leaned a bit closer to the cell phone in the middle of the table. "Takashi Shirogane, second in command in the Kerberos Program."

"Thanks," said Lance. Shiro nodded to him in appreciation, but Keith made no acknowledgement that he was speaking at all.

"Go ahead," said Keith. "Start from the beginning, and tell us _everything_ you think we need to know."

Shiro nodded, took a deep breath, and began.

18

Okay, so I'm an astrophysicist, but my specialty is astrogeology. I study rocks, minerals—pretty much anything in space. My mission was conceived about six or seven years ago—NASA decided that they wanted to know more about the outer radius of the solar system, especially with bodies around Pluto and in the Kuiper Belt. Some of the derive was related to the ninth planet theory, some of it was about getting a clearer view about the outer radius of what we had orbiting our sun, and some of it was plain old scientific observations.

The thing was, we needed to travel out further than we usually did in order to operate the drone we were going to be using as a part of the operation. The problem was the precision. We weren't just landing on the planet and roving around, no, we were approaching multiple bodies and taking samples, analyzing them on-site with the drone. This meant we needed to be able to control it with enough real-time precision to get the job done.

I was brought on a little later in the program, actually. Dr. Holt had already put together the parameters for the device, and his son Matt—also past his doctorate, but it's easier to not refer to them both as "doctor;" you know how it is. Anyway, the mission as simple enough when you get right down to it: we shuttle the new control craft with the drone out past the asteroid belt to get a better position. Then, we release the drone to continue on toward the edge of the solar system. The control craft would orbit one of Jupiter's moons—Ganymede—from where we'd control the drone.

It was a long way, yeah, but we don't know about the outer solar system. It's a little crazy that we weren't even sure if there was a ninth planet out there or something, some larger body… When you think about how much we're learning about exo-systems, it's almost embarrassing how little we know about our own systems. That's what we were out to find. What's the Kuiper Belt even fully made of? How did it form the way it does? These are the questions we were looking to answer.

It was a pretty well-known mission, you know—there were some news outlets that reported it as the "next step in the space race," nudging forward the world in general toward further space exploration. That wasn't what we were really going for, but it was nice to have the spotlight back on space. The furthest manned space mission has that kind of effect. Agent McClain, I'm sure you've seen the outcome of this media frenzy in the funding of your own work, in one way or another. Yeah.

I know that Dr. Holt was very enthusiastic about his research. This was the culmination of his life's work—this was really his project, not mine. He had gone over everything so many times, making sure that everything was just where it needed to be. He was particular like that. I remember one time, in a simulated flight test, Matt brought in a sandwich—something he'd picked up in the cafeteria or whatever, and he'd brought it in as we were setting everything up. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but when Dr. Holt noticed, he got really upset. Not angry—I don't think I ever saw Dr. Holt mad. But he wasn't happy, and it was… _weird_. He was so slow and serious, the way he asked Matt to leave, and it scared Matt a whole lot more than I think it would have if he'd just yelled at him. There was a quiet seriousness in his voice. After Matt had exited, there was the most uncomfortable silence I've ever experienced as Dr. Holt and I kept working.

I don't mean to make Dr. Holt seem like some kind of tyrant when I'm talking about him like this, and I really want you to know that. He cared a lot about this project, and he cared a lot about his son. His way of showing that was the extra care he took in every part of the project. Like—there was this one night, and we'd both stayed way too late, working on some of the specifications for the drone itself. When Dr. Holt realized that it was going on nine-thirty, he suggested we get out of there and get something to eat. I agreed, of course, because I guess I'd forgotten to get hungry while working, and it just sort of hit me all at once.

We ended up at an Applebee's that wasn't too far from the lab, and we got to talking. He was talking mostly about his family. He mentioned his wife, and how she was very anxious about him and Matt leaving on a mission together, especially one as far-off and as dangerous as this. He mentioned the way Matt was excited, and had practically _begged_ him be his pilot. He'd given in, I guess, because Matt was "the only pilot he'd really trust with his life." Then, he took a swig of the beer he was drinking, and added that if any pilot was going to kill him in space somehow, he'd want it to be someone he could yell at afterward. He was funny like that.

Then, he mentioned his other kid, Katie, and how he was most worried about her. She'd been going through a rough time at that point, I guess, and his face really fell when he talked about it. He had almost postponed the project so that he could stay around with her, help her through whatever was going on, but he knew that she'd hate that. Instead, he was determined to get back to her safely, make sure that everything worked out for her. That was why he was so carefree, why he was so careful about getting everything right. He had people to get it right for.

What? Oh, me? I guess I had stuff going on at home, too, but I was young and I was ready for anything, you know? I'd spent my post-grad time just analyzing the same samples everyone else had analyzed a million times before, from Curiosity or whatever. This was my chance to do something larger, to really make my mark on history. That's what I was focused on, really.

You know, thinking back, the interaction I had with a scientist from SETI just before we left seems like it was a whole lot more significant now than it had at the time. She came to the lab a few days before the launch, and everyone was frantically going over all of the parts of the operation as many times as we could. I think she knew there was no way she was going to be able to talk with Dr. Holt, so she came to me while I was checking the stock of sample containers, being sure they would be clean and secured correctly for the drone to use them, when she came up from behind.

"Excuse me, Doctor Shirogane?" she asked, and I almost jumped; I definitely lost track of the containers I was counting. I sighed and turned to her.

"That's me," I said. "And you are?"

"Doctor Angela Sattler," she said, extending her hand. I took it, and shook. Her grip was firm. "I'm here from SETI."

"Oh?" I said, and I could tell she wasn't sure what to make of my reaction. "How can I help you?"

"Yes, well," she said, adjusting her glasses and holding a folder out to me. I took it. "I know the Kerberos Project has a pretty specific objective that _doesn't_ concern the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but…" She trailed off, and I didn't interrupt her. "I was hoping that you might keep an eye out for anything that might…" She trailed off again, there, and I figured this time I could help her along.

"If we find anything that might indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life?" I offered. I raised an eyebrow. "It's pretty far from the sun to be habitable for any life we could imagine."

Dr. Sattler nodded. "That's true," she said, "but there's a possibility that we detected radio signals from some object just outside of the Kuiper Belt, and we—" She blushed at this point, so I offered her a smile, to try to lighten the mood a bit. "It's not that we're normally looking for an extraterrestrial communication. It's not set patterns. Instead, it's chatter."

"Chatter?"

"Radio chatter, as if there's something out there, communicating with something else."

Now, I just stared at her, because it seemed to be something unreal. I mean, she had a basis she stood on, and up until then I had never doubted the veracity of the SETI Institute. But just by _probability_ , there really wasn't much of a chance of there being an alien spacecraft on the edge of our solar system. So I told her I'd keep my eyes out, that if I saw anything, I'd let SETI know, and that I had a lot to do at the moment; I'd check the file that she had given me later.

She wasn't about to let me go, though. As I turned around to go back to my counting, she caught my arm, and I turned back to her. "Takashi—excuse me, Dr. Shirogane—please." Her eyes were locked on mine, and they were serious, not pleading. "If you _do_ find anything, report it to us. I have reason to believe public agencies would not have this information further scrutinized, as we would." She narrowed his eyes as the end, to emphasize her point, and I just assured her that I would.

I wish I actually had. That would have made everything easier for me, looking back, but hindsight is 20/20.

The launch went perfectly. Everything on time, down to the second, nothing even getting close to the edge of the margins of error. I figure that goes to the hard work of the whole team, but I'd attribute it to Dr. Holt, who had put so much work into making sure that everything was just right, every step of the way. Matt, too—he had spent countless hours in the simulator, making sure that he was able to interface with the shuttle's controls as easily as if he were just driving a car. As we pulled away from Earth, it was like the worst turbulence I'd ever felt in an airplane, but bumpier. When we breached the atmosphere, though, it was even smoother than I could have imagined.

It was calm, and that wasn't something I'd expected. I mean, I thought it would be slightly more tense, after all of the high tension before we had launched. But once we were out of the atmosphere, all of that kind of… melted away. I guess that all of that frantic preparation lead to being in just the right place for us.

It took us about a year to get past the asteroid belt, and I'm not going to lie, it felt like even longer. I liked the company of Matt and Dr. Holt, but just the three of us all the way up there got a little monotonous.

We read a lot of ebooks, did little anti-gravity tricks with pretty much anything we could think of doing, and even figured out how to use the propulsion of the ship to create just enough "gravity" for us to do our exercises—the ones that made sure our muscles didn't turn to jelly—with some kind of resistance. Matt made a joke at one point that when we got a little further, he'd be the second-strongest man in space. Dr. Holt had raised an eyebrow and said "I think you're not as strong as _Shiro_ , so you'd be third." It took Matt a minute to get that one, Dr. Holt and I laughing the whole time.

Everything went according to plan—we dealt with routine maintenance issues, and had a few close calls while navigating through the asteroid filed, but we didn't' have any major issues during our journey out. Sort of—sort of the "calm before the storm."

We arrived near Jupiter at just after 450 days into our trip, and we were able to successfully enter the orbit of Ganymede without much issue. The tricky part was calibrating the ship so that it would orbit the moon without being pulled into the massive gravity of Jupiter itself, but of course Dr. Holt had adjusted for that, and the craft was able to automatically re-calibrate itself to stay in orbit once we got going.

Once we relayed the message back to the ISS and to Earth that we had arrived, we immediately got to work. We knew that this was the defining moment for us—we had to be very precise about launching the drone, to make sure that we had the right velocity coming around the orbit to really launch the drone in the right direction.

Once it was launched, my job started for real. I had to navigate the drone, once it got to the edge of the system, to the different bodies it was going to collect data on. It was going to be hard to do, because I wasn't really sure what I was going to be looking for. The Kuiper Belt is totally uncharted territory, so whatever I found was going to be totally new. That was exciting, and interesting, and instead…

I guess we found something new.

Um…

19

"Guys, can we take a break? I'm sorry, I…"

"It's fine," said Keith, reaching forward and pressing the record button on the phone app. "Don't worry about it."

Shiro nodded, stood up, and fiddled with his prosthetic as he faced the sink, away from the two agents. Lance looked to Keith, who hadn't taken any notes during Shiro's explanation. He didn't have any notes on his own notepad, other than the name of the SETI scientist—Angela Sattler—and a few question marks after that. The rest of it, he had already heard before. Shiro was right when he had noted that it had been an important leap in space sciences—Lance's current observations got pushed through when the Kerberos Project launched, and he was even able to receive time at Arecibo for observations. And after Shiro had gotten back, the new public opinion of what had happened with Kerberos had shunned him back to his office and data collecting again.

He looked to Keith, who was watching Shiro intensely. Lance figured that he'd already heard this story—when Shirogane had gone public with it, it had gotten very popular in certain circles, and those were the types of circles he was sure Keith kept tabs on. He knew about it because it was a part of his discipline, but he had never bothered to listen to the details. He had avoided anything that Shirogane had said because it seemed to just be making a mockery of space sciences as a whole. This guy came back from space and started spouting all of this to make up for the complete _failure_ of his mission…

NASA had let him go, and while he had tried to get people to listen to his story, it made much more sense to believe a reputable scientific organization over the words of one paranoid astronaut. Not even SETI was interested in what he had to say, since NASA had reported even before he did the results of his disastrous mission, and their account was much more reliable and sensible-sounding. His story had sort of died out after a while, apparently for everyone except people who were interested in that sort of thing—people like his partner.

Keith turned toward Lance, and they made eye contact for a brief moment—the first time Keith had really looked him in the eye since they had talked about the fax in the diner the other day. Lance found himself reddening with some sort of shame, but he wasn't sure where it came from. He turned away just as Keith did, and he looked back to Shirogane.

It seemed like he really believed in what he was saying. This story was _true_ to him. It was plain to say that he meant what he said, and he wanted desperately for anyone to believe him. Lance watched as Shiro looked out the small window over his sink, which had a thin film of shading on it to deter people on the outside from being able to see in. Whatever had happened, whether Shiro was telling the truth or not, he had lost his arm to tell them about it. He had faced public scrutiny from the press and from the scientific community, and now he lived out here in the desert, a disgrace. He really had no reason to keep lying, if he was.

He really believed in what he was saying, and Lance had to give that, at least, to him. That didn't make the idea of an extraterrestrial abduction and encounter any less fantastic as a plausibility.

Shiro turned back from the sink, took a deep breath, and sat down, his eyes going from Lance to Keith as he spoke. "I think I'm ready. Sorry—it's just…" He paused; took a breath. "It's a lot."

"Thank you, Shiro," said Keith, holding his hand out across the table, laying it down just beside the phone to show his proximity as support. "Just go at your own pace."

Lance felt like he should say something, too, to reassure Shiro, and said "This is really helping, getting your perspective directly."

Keith looked to him, narrowing his eyes a bit, and Lance could tell he was trying to figure out whether or not he was being genuine. Lance wasn't sure if he was or not. Shiro's eyes tilted together at the outside in a half-smile, and Lance deliberately didn't acknowledge Keith's look. Keith looked to Shiro.

"Are you ready?" Shiro nodded. Keith pressed the record button on the phone again.

20

About three days after we launched the drone, it went offline. I tried everything I could—re-establishing the link, resetting the ship command, checking the circuitry, all of that. There wasn't anything I could find wrong on our end. Dr. Holt was calm when he methodically went through very one of the craft's numerous systems for any sign of error, and Matt just nervously sat at the helm. I contacted the ISS and then Houston and relayed the information, and they asked me a series of questions I'd already asked myself about the drone and if I'd checked everything and if everything was in line—it was clear that they'd thought that it was my fault. And that made sense, I guess, but at that point I was pretty sure that it wasn't anything I'd done. The thing had just… stopped working.

Now, we spent about a say in orbit without any connection to the drone, which was a difficult thing to do. There was an air of anxiety that you could practically breathe. The craft wasn't large, and it seemed more than ever like it was tiny, pushing in on all of us. It was more than just claustrophobic. It was _oppressive_. None of us knew what exactly to do. We knew how to repair the drone, how to deal with it if any of the major functions stopped working, but to lose contact completely? That was something none of us, I guess, was equipped to deal with.

I…

It was at the end of that day when the screen—the navigation screen for the drone—came back to life. I wasn't near the monitor, but I _heard_ the sound from the display. A grating sound, metal on metal, and it _filled_ the ship. When I got to the screen, Dr. Holt was right behind me, and there were a few flashes on the screen—filled with static, a digital static unlike what I'd ever seen before. There was something-something that was interfering with the signal. I hadn't seen anything like it before. It was flashes of color intermitted by spikes of light and noise…

Dr. Holt suggested we try to adjust the cables on the inside of the system or something like that, but after that, the picture cleared up a bit. The drone wasn't in space, that much was clear to see. It was in a dark but lit hallway of some sort, metal walls and floor, being dragged forward by something just outside of its view. But it was being dragged—wherever it was, there was gravity, or at least a way to simulate it.

We were orbiting a moon of Jupiter. There was no one around to take our drone.

The video cut out just after that. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or if the drone just finally shut down, but it was enough to send a chill down my spine. Dr. Holt withdrew into himself and went back to the control area with Matt. I sat in the chair in front of the drone control station and just stared at the blank screen for a while. I tried to wrap my mind around what had happened, but I couldn't come up with any possibilities of what happened to the drone.

I'm sorry, I know this isn't what you're looking for, but I felt—you know that feeling when nothing matters? When it feels like nothing you can do will change anything and that your entire life was for nothing? Despair. That's it. And never had I felt it until then. I felt like there was nothing I could do at all, even while I knew that I had to do _something_.

I'm sorry, I'll get back to it, I—yeah, I know. But that's not what you want from me. I know full well how important this whole thing is. I…

The power went out. The lights, the controls, everything. I mean, not _everything_ —the life support systems were still running, and the propulsion system was working well enough so that we weren't pulled off course of the orbit, but…

Neither of you have been in the dark in space. Space is _dark_ , and it's everywhere. There was nowhere for us to go, and the system was out. Matt was at the controls, trying every switch he could, but nothing was really working for him. Dr. Holt was keeping a façade of calm, watching him as he was working. I could feel my heart beating harder as I looked through the window of the craft, ahead of us, and I saw the violent orange and redness of Jupiter swirling below us. We moved, seemingly slowly in relation to the size of the giant, and it would have been something totally sublime if we weren't completely terrified.

Then, the craft swept around so that the small window was facing _them_.

Look, I'm sorry, Agent McC—Lance. This isn't going to seem like it's real. You're not going to believe me. But I'm—I'm telling the truth. And you might think I'm delusional, but this is what happened to us.

The ship—it wasn't like a space shuttle or something, it was sleeker, more oblong, more of a single piece than something constructed. There was probably some sort of window on it, but we couldn't see it—we couldn't see any indication that there was any break in the outside, any entrance or exit, any apparatus for communication at all. It was sleek, and it was large, and it was facing our craft, moving steadily closer to us.

I think Matt called out, asking what it was, but I looked to Dr. Holt. He had his eyes locked on the thing as it moved closer to us, and we rotated so that we were looking at it dead-on for just a moment before we continued to turn. Matt was pulling at the controls, trying to move the craft, call for help, do _something_.

The thing opened up, like a big mouth—hinged, almost, but not a hinge. There was nothing but darkness inside, at least from what we could see, as we were pulled in. We were like a small fish being engulfed by a whale, and there was nothing we could to take control of the situation. We couldn't do anything but sit and wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.

I remember saying something to Dr. Holt about keeping alert, about making sure that we stayed aware of what was going on even as the mouth of the other spacecraft closed around ours. Then, I'm aware of there being more time, but I don't remember any of it. It's sort of a blurry dream and then darkness, and I can't see any specific parts of it.

When I came to, I was laying down on a table, strapped down by my wrists, ankles, and waist. There was a light suspended over me, and I did my best to strain my neck to see my surroundings. I could see there was some other form on a table nearby me, but it didn't look like it was human. I didn't know what it was, and I could see nothing in the shadows of the room. It was cold, and I could breathe—I didn't know how I could breathe. I wasn't in the craft. I wasn't with Matt or Dr. Holt. I wasn't wearing my clothes—only a thin layer of cloth in a sort of gown made of a material I didn't recognize. I wavered in and out of the haze, strapped there to that cold, metal table, for a while. I have no idea how long I was there, and I'm not sure I want to know.

When I woke up for the last time, the thing on the table next to me was gone, and I could feel fear crawling up from my stomach to get caught in my throat. A noise came from the far side of the room, a clanging, short and sharp in the small room, but I didn't see it's source at first. The light was on right above me, and I couldn't see the periphery of the room.

Then, it stepped toward me. A tall, grayish purple humanoid. It had a dull yellow color for its eyes and a thin coat of fur covering its body. It wore a kind of bodysuit, like a wetsuit for surfing, but not exactly. It moved closer to me, and I was surprised at two things: its similarity to human taxonomy, and the large saw-like instrument it held in one hand.

"Who are you?" I asked, "and what is this place?"

The thing hesitated for a half a second, but was not deterred by my speaking. It continued toward me, and began to raise the tool. It said something aloud, but didn't seem to be addressing me. I couldn't understand what it was saying; its language was so alien that I don't think I could even recreate the noises that it was making at all.

Something responded to it, I think through a speaker somewhere in the room, and I couldn't understand what it was saying. The alien standing over me, however, definitely got the message in some capacity, because it leaned in closer to me and…

I tried to pull away, but it wasn't worth it. The saw thing—the saw, it vibrated, and that made it very easy for it to…

Sorry, I…

The alien left me after that, and I felt myself drifting toward that unconscious place I'd drifted to more than a couple of times after I'd been brought onto the craft. I was pretty sure I screamed while it cut—I'm pretty sure I screamed afterward. I was only half awake, whether from the pain or whatever it was they were doing to me to keep me drowsy, I don't know. The bleeding stopped pretty quickly, and I think that was something they did. I'm not sure if…

I fell asleep fully again, and when I came to, there were two of them in the room with me. One of them was using a needle to probe a vein in my arm, the arm they'd left me, and the other was inspecting my neck and head. I tried to jerk my head away, but it didn't do anything but agitate the alien who was trying to work with the needle. It pressed something on the table—I couldn't see what exactly, because my neck was held down—that caused another clamp to come from the table and lock down my upper arm, just below the armpit, to make sure that I would not move and cause more problems for it again. "What are you doing?" I asked. I think I was trying to yell, but it wasn't working, like they had taken from me other than just my arm. I tried to pull away but could not, and I felt the needle prick again and the room swam. I was out before I could do anything more.

I woke up at some point, and the restraints were gone from my arm, stomach, and ankles. I w

As hazy at first, and I didn't want to push it. This could have been a trap, and I wasn't interested in getting on the bad side of these aliens. They had made it perfectly clear that they were not interested in just making conversation. After lying there for a while, I knew that I couldn't just lie there, because I would fall back into the sleep. I wanted desperately not to do that, to let them do whatever it was they were doing.

I felt my chest seize up, but it was a different fear than I had felt back on the Kerberos spacecraft. I wasn't held up because of my inability to do anything to help my situation. I knew that there was still hope. I had a purpose now, a goal. Survival.

I rolled onto my left side and pushed myself up into a sitting position. It was a lot of work, and I realized for the first time that I had lost a lot of blood and that I had not eaten for a long time—the exact time, I wasn't sure, but a while.

I got to my feet, wavered, and found my balance. It was difficult with… It was difficult to find my balance with just one arm. It threw me off, at first. But I caught myself, figured it out. I tried to get a good grip on my surroundings. The metal floor was cold below my bare feet, and I felt vulnerable in the weird gown they had put me in.

I went in the direction I thought I had seen the alien come in through when it had come the first time, but I wasn't able to find a door. There wasn't a door, I mean—I wasn't able to find one. There had to be some way in and out of the room, but there wasn't a door in the sense that I had expected.

Instead, when I moved close enough to one part of the wall, it simply opened up for me—the whole wall—but there didn't seem to be any door. Just the wall, splitting apart from some seam I couldn't even perceive. I stepped through it carefully as it closed behind me.

The hallway looked familiar to me. Dimly lit, smooth metal. There wasn't much to distinguish it from the room I had just left, except for its shape, but that didn't mean that I wasn't going to recognize it immediately. Already burned into my mind was the image from the screen of the drone, the hallway down which it was being dragged, scraping against the floor.

I winced and picked a direction. I think it was the opposite of where the drone was being dragged—at least, that's what I thought at the time. I wanted to distance myself from where it went. That was my first move. Because where it was, they were, too.

I stumbled down those hallways, and I am surprised I wasn't caught. I was almost caught when I was about to creep through an intersection with another hall when two of the tall, dark lavender aliens entered from a side-room. I pushed myself back against the wall, into the shadows left behind by the poor lighting, and waited, my heart pounding with an intensity that I thought would be audible and give me away.

They passed the other way, though, and I waited until they were well outside of my vision before I began to move again, following them. I wasn't sure which was to go, but I had already made enough progress in this direction that I figured it was my only real choice. Even though it was a massive and strange spaceship, it was still an isolated space, and I was going to find the end of it one way or another. I would be able to find the craft. When I did that, I would be able to get us out of there.

I…

I'm a little… I didn't go back for them. I knew that they had to be on that craft somewhere, and I—I didn't have time to find them. I didn't have time to go back for them. I didn't know where to even begin. I don't… I don't know where Matt or Dr. Holt are. Still. They might still be on that craft, and I…

I…

I'm sorry.

I, um… I made it to what was the closest to a doorway I'd seen on all of the sleek ship not that much later. Two red vertical pieces of metal stood out of the wall, about four feet from each other, running from the floor to the ceiling. There weren't any seams, any intersection between these pieces and the solid metal of the rest of the ship, but the color and the way that the two pieces were raised from the rest of the wall made them really stand out against the rest of the near-featureless hallway. There wasn't any apparatus to open the door—no knob or lever or anything like that—so I just put my hand near it, reaching out.

The door opened. It did from the middle, opening vertically, just as the other had before. It was quick, and I stepped inside quickly, letting it slip shut behind me.

I immediately ducked into the shadows. I have a theory about these aliens—I think that they're extremely photosensitive, and that's why their whole ship was only slightly lit, dark in most of the corners. It might be why they had such a plain design scheme, without too many distracting lights or colors. Of course, that's conjecture—sorry, I know you're looking for the facts, not what I think about it. I just—that's what was running through the back of my mind as I ducked down, a larger, broader alien standing a bit in front of me, at the center of the room. It stood at some sort of control panel, which didn't seem to have much of an interface. It had either buttons or a touch-display in the same plain metal as the rest of the spacecraft, and the keyboard was laid out in a semi-circular pattern. The alien's fingers worked their way across the keyboard as darkened images flashed across a screen in front of it—a screen that didn't seem to have any luminescence. Just a plain image of what it was, as difficult to see in the dark room as anything else. The alien didn't seem to have any difficulty with its work, however, and was intensely interested in whatever it was doing.

It is a good thing that it was, because had it been even remotely turned toward the soundless and featureless opening in the wall I'd used to gain entrance to the room, I would've been caught immediately. I slunk back into the shadows, staying silent, watching. I felt clammy, and was worried that it would have some way of detecting my fear, like a dog. It worked through a couple of different things on the screen—some images I didn't recognize, some images and what seemed to be a kind of writing that was totally unrecognizable to me—a completely different alphabet from anything I'd ever seen on Earth.

I shrunk back into the shadows as slowly and carefully as I could, watching the alien with fascination and horror. If it turned around and saw me, I was going to be taken back to that room and…

The door opened again. I scrambled back a little further, finding something like a smooth corner of the room, and held my breath as another of the aliens entered the room. It went to the other, saying something that was completely unintelligible to me. It was agitated, gesticulating as it spoke, and the alien who was here at first, the larger one, followed it out of the room, the door closing behind it. I couldn't be sure—again, I had no idea what they were saying to one another—but I had the feeling that the fuss was about me. I was missing, and that was a problem. Which meant that they knew I was gone. It meant that I didn't have much more time before they found me, once they started looking.

I waited a minute or so, however, before I came out of the shadows. I might have been in a rush, but I was also more scared than I had ever been in my life, so I had to be as careful as I could be. My eyes stayed on the area of the smooth wall that was the door until I got to the control panel, expecting for one of the aliens to come in through it and catch me at any given moment.

When I turned to the panel, it was about level with my upper chest and head, meaning that I had to crane my head upward to see the display. The aliens really were taller than I was, and I'm not a small person. I reached up with my hand and tried to press the buttons on the strange semicircle keyboard with inhuman alphabetical symbols, but the screen reacted before I even made contact with the metal, changing the screen from the writing that was displayed to a series of images. They were of space, cascading through—different planets, systems, nebulae, that sort of thing—and they finished on a familiar sight.

"Earth…" I muttered, staring in awe at the blue and green globe displayed on the screen. I stared at the image on the screen for a moment before reaching up and tapping another symbol, just to see what would happen. A series of images opened up, superimposed over the image of Earth. The pictures were of me, and Matt, and Dr. Holt—we were sleeping. We were sleeping in the sleep-pods in the Kerberos craft. I tapped another key, and the pictures of us disappeared, replacing themselves with an in-depth schematic of the Kerberos craft. It was detailed in a way I couldn't comprehend, down to the tiniest details of mechanical precision. The parts were labeled both in English and in the strange alien language.

I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. I had seen something like this before, of course I had, but I was a key part of the Kerberos Program. The fact that this kind of detailed plan was on an alien spaceship, that meant—that meant that…

They knew about the Kerberos Program. They knew about _Earth_. Which meant that they must have been observing us for a while, _waiting_ for us…

I'm…

I hit a few more keys, frantically—I should have been more calm about it, but I wasn't. It was—I wasn't calm. I hit some keys and some new images flashed, some text that matched the symbols on the keyboard but didn't look anything like letters at all. The screen cycled through images of Earth, the Kerberos craft, more text, and then the whole screen went black. I took a step back from the console, recoiling, and it began to move. The whole console, it began to move downward, sliding slowly into the floor. It didn't make a noise—nothing in this ship made a noise—but that didn't mean I wasn't terrified that it would somehow alert the aliens, they would come back, and I would be caught again.

I darted back to the corner of the room, crouching in the shadows, falling backward into the wall a little bit as I did. I still wasn't completely adjusted to the loss of my arm. It was…

It was weird. And I was scared.

Goddam, I was scared.

The console slid downward, and it disappeared into the impossibly smooth, seamless floor. I stared at the place where it had disappeared for a moment before a crack opened in the floor, larger than before, widening into a circle about five feet in diameter. It rose about six inches from the floor and rested there. It was barely noticeable, really, in the low light of the room, and I crept forward toward it only once I was sure that it hadn't made any indication to any of the aliens that I was in this room. With one last glance over my shoulder, I scuttled over to the circle, squatting low, and observed it.

There was really nothing different about it from the rest of the room—it was the same metal, the same smoothness, and the same eerie otherworldliness. I reached out with my hand to touch it, and when nothing happened upon contact, I carefully stood back up and stepped into the center, looking around the room from there.

The circle began to descend. I watched as the room ascended around me, and I held my one hand at the ready, clenched in a fist, in case anything showed up as I went downward. I watched as the floor rose around me, and I was enveloped in darkness for a brief moment as the floor reclosed above me. I had the vague sensation of a descent, but I couldn't be sure. I was conscious of the dull aching of my shoulder where my arm once connected, and I used that as an anchor point to keep a handle on my placement in space at all.

A crack of dim light appeared around the bottom of the circle, but to my newly dark-adjusted eyes, it seemed to be blindingly bright. The circle below me continued to descend as a large and cavernous room manifested itself around me. The dim lights ran down along the top, leaving shadows throughout the high-ceilinged room. It took longer than I liked, crouched on the circle of floor, to get from the ceiling down to the floor. The whole time, however, I paid attention to the strange, egg-shaped pods that populated the room at sparse intervals.

They were the same metal as the rest of the ship, it seemed, but at varying sizes, all large enough to fit at least a couple of those large aliens inside. Some of them seemed like they would be able to hold a small house inside of them. I looked down to see the circle of floor meld into the rest of the floor as if there were nothing there at all, and I was in the room, on the floor. I stepped tentatively forward toward the closest egg-shaped monolith.

I reached for it, my hand stretched out in front of me. I pulled my arm back as soon as the metal began to pull away in an arch-shape, about the right size for one of the aliens that ran the ship. I ducked backward, just in case it had reacted to another alien and not to me, but there were none of the tall purple figures around. I waited just a moment longer than I really needed to, and when I emerged from the shadows, I took a few hesitant steps forward.

The first thing that I was assured of was that this wasn't the way the aliens reproduced—the egg shape must have been entirely coincidental. There was no reproductive apparatus in here, that much I could be sure of.

What took me by more surprise was the Kerberos craft, sitting neatly in the center of the egg, its edges brushing up against the sides of the outer structure. It was lit with a barely perceptible light from below, but I would have recognized the shape of it anywhere. The craft was inside of the egg, which meant, logically following, that the rest of the eggs…

I moved forward more quickly now, with less hesitation. This was something I could work with, something familiar. I could use the craft. I could get out. I could—

I moved to the entrance hatch, which was left open, probably from when the aliens had first captured us. I put my hand out to it in order to begin to help myself into the craft, and the hole in the side of the egg closed up behind me, leaving me inside with the Kerberos craft. I turned from the smooth, featureless inside wall of the egg to the more familiar spacecraft and tilted my head up to peer inside. I wondered for a brief moment if there was an alien inspecting the inside who would come out at me, but I was too preoccupied with getting into _my_ ship. Getting somewhere I could be in control again.

Luckily, I guess, there were no aliens inside.

I'm sorry, that wasn't a good joke, and…

God dammit.

What? No, I've got it, I just…

I did find Dr. Holt.

I found…

I found what was left of him. And I'll leave it at that.

I…

I think the information's in the full report I left with SETI. I don't know if they kept it or not. I can give you a copy later, I just…

I moved him out of the way. I left…

I put him outside of the craft and closed the door, because there was too much…

I didn't find Matt. I didn't see him there, and I still don't know where he went. He's probably still on that ship, but I doubt he's still alive. How would he be? I felt what they did to me, and…

I sat in the pilot's seat and flipped a few switches. There didn't seem to be any power in the craft—not at first. It was not until I felt the vague sensation of movement that I flipped the switches again, activating a few of the auxiliary systems on the craft. I caught my breath in the back of my throat, looking over the control panels for any indication of working systems. I didn't put any thought into how I was going to get the craft _out_ of the egg—I would get to that when I needed to—but I could get this running again, and I could _escape_. I could get out…

Then, I noticed the small window in front of the control panel. I didn't see the smooth gray inside wall of the metal egg anymore. Instead, I saw the rows of eggs, placed throughout the hangar, dozens of them, and I realized that the egg was above them, and the egg was _moving_. I pressed a few of the controls on the panel in front of me to no avail; the egg was moving forward with the Kerberos craft—and me—inside of it, and I had no control.

I strapped myself into the seat and grabbed ahold of the controls. The egg raced toward the far wall of the large room, I could see that, and I could also see the aliens pouring out of different doors that appeared in the smooth walls at regular intervals. They were gesturing, but I couldn't see them clearly through the thick glass and couldn't hear what they were intoning to each other—not that I would have been able to understand it, anyway. A few of them began to fire upward—I'm not sure what kind of weapon they were using, because I couldn't really see, but they were definitely taking some sort of shot up at me. At first, this scared me, but then I realized that it meant I was doing something they didn't want me to do. They didn't want me to be moving in this egg. That meant that I was either going to get out, or they wouldn't be able to get me back. I guess, I would either escape or die. And I would rather die than go back there.

The egg gained velocity, and it moved without wavering toward the far end of the room, and I instinctively held up my arms against the impact at it was about to hit. The egg on the outside re-formed itself around the craft, and I have to assume that I passed through the metal wall in some way. I know, it doesn't make sense, but the technology they had was somewhere far ahead of ours…

The egg's inside wall remained completely featureless for what may have been a minute but was probably much shorter after that. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest, and my one hand on the controls seemed, to me, not to be enough. This was a three-person craft, and there was no way that I was going to be able to pilot this thing on my own, and I was still in the _egg_ …

The light went off inside of the egg. There wasn't much to begin with, but when it went out, I was in a totally enclosed space with nothing to light my vision other than the few lit indicator lights on the control panel in front of me. I could feel waves of panic coming over me, but I was able to swallow them back down when something appeared on the inside of the egg's wall just outside of the Kerberos craft.

There were lines of the language of the aliens, the foreign alphabet moving in ribbons across the inside of the egg wall, a faint flow in the complete darkness. I couldn't understand it, but it was the last thing I remember before the acceleration.

I don't know how it worked, but the gravity was preserved in the egg. But that meant that when it accelerated, I could feel it. I don't know how much it accelerated, but I estimate more than 10 Gz. I passed out completely.

When I woke up, I was hurtling through the atmosphere toward Earth, the egg gone. Thirty seconds later, I made impact with the Gulf of Mexico. An hour later, I was recovered by the Coast Guard. I had been in space for only a year and a half. My return trip, one that had taken us over a year on the way out, had taken less than a week, perhaps even shorter.

I—I can't explain it all. I'm…

21

"I'm sorry, that's what I have." Shiro's hand shook a little bit as he took a sip from the glass of water. He placed it down on the table in front of him, right back in the place from where he had taken it, and looked back to the agents, though he didn't make eye contact with either of them exactly. "Is there anything… Anything else you need to know?"

Lance looked to Keith, trying to judge his reaction. His partner's face was statuesque, frozen in concentration at what Shiro had been saying. Lance wasn't exactly sure that he'd seen Kogane's face move at all the whole time Shiro had been talking. "Keith?" asked Lance.

He snapped out of the daze. "Yeah, sorry," said Keith. He reached forward and pressed the stop button on the cell phone recording and slid it toward him on the table. "Shiro: thank you. You don't know how helpful this is going to be for our investigation."

"Neither do I," said Lance.

Keith's head whipped toward Lance, his eyes daggers, stabbing into Lance's.

"Thank you, Shiro," said Lance, turning away from his steely partner and offering what he hoped was a soft smile. "We will take this all into account during further review of the case."

Shiro was looking down, his hand fiddling with a joint in his prosthetic. He raised his eyes slightly to Lance, and he nodded. "Yeah."

"Thank you again," said Keith, addressing Shiro. Lance could feel the hostility in his voice, all of it directed at him. "I will let you know what comes up. Take—take some time for yourself. I'll call you."

Shiro nodded, and Keith got up from the kitchen table, taking his jacket as he went. Lance stood up just after, retrieving his pad of paper from the table. He had only absent-mindedly taken some notes, nothing of much import. He wasn't going to forget what Shiro had just told them. He knew that much. He pushed his chair in behind him and followed Keith silently through the living room and out the front door into the New Mexico evening. He closed the door behind him, leaving Shiro behind them, alone.

* * *

 _ **Mulder** : We've both lost so much... but I believe that what we're looking for is in the X-Files. I'm more certain than ever that the truth is in there._

 _ **Scully** : I've heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers._

* * *

 _A/N: I really hope you enjoyed that MONSTER of a chapter! Now that we've got the personal abduction narrative involved, things are really going to get moving! We'll get back to more of the hands-on investigating in the next chapter! Thanks so much for reading!_


	7. Rift

**Rift**

* * *

 _ **Man in Black:** Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into the three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare that seeing is believing!_

* * *

22

Lance stared at his hands, sitting in the driver's seat of the car in the parking lot while Keith went inside to pick up some more coffee. He was going to go in with him, but then had decided better of it and stayed behind. Maybe a couple of minutes apart would be good for them, so that they would figure out that the sidewise glances and glares weren't getting them anywhere.

Of course, then Lance realized that would have to apply to the way he approached things, as well, not just Keith, and found himself pouting. Staring at his hands, crossed in his lap, he suddenly wished that he was back at home. He wished that he was in his family's backyard, his mom and dad babbling at each other in the kitchen about whatever they were cooking that night, his siblings running around inside, his sister off to the right of the back porch, reading a book, and him, looking up to the sky. There was a freshness that seemed to surround his home, a sort of feeling of newness and life. It wasn't that this feeling was totally absent now, but it was a sort of a synesthesiatic feeling of nostalgia he couldn't shake. He remembered being there as a kid, as a teenager, with the sounds and smells of his family around him, looking up to the sky and wanting to study the stars, to know more about them, to see what was really out there.

Now, he wondered how much of that was just foolish hope for something that wasn't really there at all, or if it was as earnest as he had once thought it. He wondered more and more, now that he found he couldn't fully trust what he'd always known, always learned of...

He had always wanted to find the stars because of what they were, these pinpoints in the sky that offered so much space and knowledge and fascination for him, but if what Shirogane was saying was true, if what he was implying was anything close to what was actually out there, that meant that...

It meant that everything he had ever done was completely foolish, misguided, and off-base. It meant that all of the work he had done studying stars, exoplanets, pulsars, nebulae, and galaxies was completely different from what was actually there, and the nostalgic feeling of home, with those idealized stars smattered out there in the galaxy, was nothing but a fantasy now. Everything that he'd built, everything that he knew, it was nothing at all in the face of the aliens that Shiro conjectured were truly out there.

He didn't know how that would really affect the way home felt to him. Even now, as he wished for home, he wondered if it would really have that same charm as he had always felt. He wondered if it would even be remotely the same, without that feeling...

The door on the passenger side opened, and his partner slid into the seat, placing his cup of coffee in the cupholder without saying anything to Lance, buckling himself in without putting down his own cup.

Lance pulled the car out of the parking lot and they drove in a terse silence through the small town, the sand swirling around the car in little dust devils, the horizon shimmering gently in the late-afternoon heat. They pulled into the motel and went inside, Keith tossing his jacket over the back of the small chair in the room set up at the card table before they began to discuss what had just happened.

"Well, you were a perfect asshole in there," said Keith, putting his hands on his hips.

"What were we even doing?" said Lance, throwing his hands up frustration. He had planned to approach this calmly, but the second he was actually _confronted_ with an actual confrontation, it didn't really work out the same way he had planned. "We don't need tabloid stories from some crazy guy who—"

"He had valuable insight, and if we'd listened for more than a half a second, maybe…"

"Maybe what?" said Lance, taking a step closer to his partner. "We'd get a good lead on El Chupacabra, too?"

"We could learn something more about what it is the government is trying to withhold! But you laughed in his _face_ , and that doesn't get us any good leads!" Keith stepped closer, too, his face turning red with anger.

"Leads on the aliens."

"Yes, leads related to…"

"Listen, I've heard my fair share of conspiracy theories in my day, so let's cut all of this Scooby-Doo mystery bullshit and get to what's really going on."

Kogane's face was only a few inches from his, and Lance could smell his coffee breath, feel the anger radiating off of his face in waves of heat. Keith actually leaned in a bit more as his scowl opened up into an angry reply.

"This is what I'm talking about!" he shouted, and Lance almost recoiled, his eyes widening. "If you don't believe it, it's some conspiracy bullshit!" He took a deep breath, but he was far from finished.

"Consider this for a moment. Just pause and think before you say anything, for once in your God damn life. Maybe what Shiro was telling us was just some delusion brought on by the stress of his experience. Maybe the trauma of losing the rest of his crew and crashing to Earth alone cause him to create an elaborate fantasy just so that he can wrap his mind around it. Maybe it's even worse for him since he has been totally disgraced, thrown out of the only life he's ever known, and constantly told that he is crazy. Maybe he's sticking to his guns, sticking to his beliefs in the same way you are right now, and he has been cut down at every turn." He took a breath. "I give him a chance to tell us his story, because I thought he might have something important to tell us. Maybe it wasn't about his experience itself—maybe it was just the way that the government hushed it up, or some detail about the Holts that might have pointed us in the right direction there. Plus, it finally gives the guy a chance to tell his story to someone who won't immediately dismiss him, someone he can trust."

"I..."

"But you weren't thinking about that, were you?" He backed off now, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow. "You weren't thinking about that. You were instead keeping these ridiculous closed-minded better-than-you attitudes that you can just say 'I told you so' to the guy who's been through more shit than you'll ever deal with." He jabbed Lance in the chest with his pointer finger. "Instead, you're just caught up in how this is all about you."

Keith withdrew his finger, looked Lance in the eye as if he was about to say something else, but then just shook his head and turned away, sighing as he did. He turned and grabbed his jacket from the chair.

"I'm going to review the case files again, cross-check them with the information we got from Shiro." He paused by the door. "I'll have my cell if you need me, but..." He paused a moment by the door, his fist clenching and releasing his fist. "...don't call." The door slammed. He was gone.

23

Keith was good at ignoring his feelings. It was something he had done somewhat semi-professionally for years, and he had the process down to a near-science. He took whatever he was feeling—usually some mix of disappointment, frustration, and rage—and buried it under intense work. It was what had gotten him off of the streets and into the program at Quantico, and it was what got him from there into the Violent Crimes Division. It was his tenacity, his ability to stick to his guns, that got him into the more unorthodox investigations the rest of the bureau wanted to leave behind. It was the way he could put all of his criticisms underneath the layers of work that he could move forward and do so well despite the fact that no one else in the bureau believed in what he was doing, in the importance of his work. It was how he did what he did.

Now was no different. He was shaking as he pulled out of the motel and took off down toward Hunk and Pidge's house, where he had effectively set up shop. He could feel the heat on the back of his neck from his own anger, and he could feel the way the embarrassment of what Lance had said to Shiro hung in his chest like a wet towel. He exchanged slight pleasantries with Hunk and Pidge at the door, but they were wary enough of his fake smile that they backed off and let him through to the garage where he had set up something of a pin board on the side wall, near Pidge's computer station.

Keith rolled the chair over and began to pick his way back through the notes, photocopied and highlighted as they were, looking for something that he could connect back to what Shiro had told them. If he looked deep enough, if he concentrated hard enough, he wouldn't have to think about Lance, about what he said, about how he had embarrassed Shiro and made a farce of the whole investigation. He shuffled through the documents labeled as a part of the Kerberos Project and told himself that he wasn't thinking about the way that he wasn't even sure about Shiro's story, about how far-fetched it sounded, even to him. He'd heard his share of abduction stories and alien experiences in his time investigating, in his communications via message boards and correspondence societies, but he had never heard anything as detailed or out there as what Shiro had told them. There really wasn't any actual _proof_ of what he had said about the ship, about the aliens, about the egg-shaped craft he had escaped in. None of that was provable. Maybe Lance, in his thick-headed, rude, and callous way, was right.

But there was more to it than just that. There was the cover up. There was the discharge of Shiro, his disgrace. There was no way they'd discharged him without a mental evaluation, and evidently he'd come up clean. There was no way they would let a man with delusions such as that walk right out. And there was the fact that the Kerberos mission wasn't officially closed after that, the fact that there were agents collecting pieces of debris under its jurisdiction, the fact that there was such an intense cover-up that there had to be something being covered up.

There had to be some truth to what Shiro had said, and it was his job to pinpoint what it was. There had to be some consistency. He picked up the report in front of him, reading through it closely instead of thinking about how close he had been to Lance as they'd been yelling, how he'd felt his partner's warmth in the way he defended himself.

KERBEROS PROJECT:  
Locate object .489, downed 0240 at localized coordinates. Proceed with extreme caution. Object may be hazardous. Use extreme caution. No force expected.  
Agents assigned will remain vigilant for observers as well as stargazers. Be aware of debris, as well as additional objects from above. Classify as seen fit.

Keith glanced to the next paper, dated a few days later. It read mainly the same, though this one referred to .490, which had him thinking that it was the way they numbered and categorized the pieces of whatever this was a piece of. However, that meant that there had to be almost 500 other pieces of space debris they had categorized similarly. This was something big, bigger and more complex than it already had seen. Keith scribbled " ?" on a sticky note and added it to the little display he had put together on the wall, connecting the different clues they'd collected so far. He swiveled from the papers to the small hunk of machinery. Hunk and Pidge had gone through a number of tests with it, but they hadn't been able to crack any of its secrets yet.

This, of course, didn't mean there wasn't more to find out about the object, but there was definitely an air of mystery surrounding it. It was just a harmless piece of broken _something_.

Keith's eyes opened wider and he swiveled back to his stacks of paper, to the files he had been reading through, and retrieved the report he had been reading. It had mentioned something about the debris, something that he now suddenly found suspect. He scanned through the page before he found what he was looking for. "Object may be hazardous. Use extreme caution. No force expected."

On the surface, this didn't seem like much. The space junk might be hazardous, whether it be radioactive or hot or infected with some space virus. It made sense to be cautious. However, it was that third sentence that stood out to him. "No force expected.". Of course, it made sense that there would be no force expected; they were retrieving something secret from the desert. No one else knew about it or cared about it, so there would be no way that they should have even needed to include that statement, unless there was some sort of precedent for confrontation. That would leave two suspects: the little conspiracy crew helping him out, who he didn't think would still be free to investigate if these agents knew of their operations, and the possibility that something had come with the debris before, and had tried to defend it.

"Holy shit," said Keith, falling back in his chair. Maybe there was something more to what Shiro had been saying than a vague mention of conspiracy. His hand went to his pocket to grab his cell phone, to tell Lance about this, to pull him in on it, but he hesitated and instead slowly pulled his hand away. He could wait telling his partner until Lance had cooled off, too. The words he'd left him with were slightly more than cutting, and he wasn't about to deal with him until he'd calmed down. Until they both had. Instead, he called out to Hunk and Pidge, pushing down thoughts of his partner as he did, getting back to work.

24

Lance looked at the few printed-out photographs in front of him and honestly had a hard time telling what was different about them. He felt like a fool-it was clunky, outdated, and usually wrong to find stuff in space using just what you could see, but that was really what he had to work with. This was usually something he had been good at, memorizing the positions of stars and where they were in the sky. It was a part of what had gotten him into astrophysics in the first place. Other people had gotten into the field because they liked the movie _Apollo 13_ or they were good with radios, but he was there because he was interested in the stars, the planets, and where they were up there. So now, staring at these few pictures and trying to find where the debris split in the sky, where it might have come from, if there was anything out of the ordinary, he felt like a total dolt for not finding it immediately.

It could be that his mind was a million miles away from the space he was trying to find. It could be that he was doing his best to not think about how much what Keith had said was accurate, and that his best was, as usual, not enough.

This was his first mission, his first case as an agent at the FBI, and instead of finding some solvable problem like he'd been looking for, he'd been stuck with this outrageous case of conspiracy and extraterrestrials. and he wanted it to not be that way. He'd been obstinate. But he had also been rude, and that wasn't what he had meant to do-he just meant to... to express his frustration. And now, Keith was right. He was an asshole, and he wasn't doing anything good for anyone. He wasn't helping Keith in whatever this investigation was, and he sure as hell wasn't helping Shiro in any of his recovery from the ordeal he'd been through. Instead, he was sitting here feeling sorry for himself, he was causing problems, and he was dead weight all around. The only reason he was here at all was because Ross had asked him to spy on Keith, keep an eye on him, whatever he wanted to call it, the point was that he wasn't even there for his skills as an investigator, he was there because he was a placeholder.

And he had still fucked it up.

Lance felt terrible, but he knew that there was nothing he could do, at this point, that would fix the things he'd done. And even if he _did_ fix them, he would still be on this wild goose chase, looking at things that he knew could empirically never be real.

The stars didn't line up, and that frustrated him. He should have been able to see the simple deviation between two photographs of the sky. He knew these stars, where they were both in the sky and their location in the galaxy, and at least with the naked eye, what was visible, that should have been enough. But he couldn't.

He pushed himself back from the card table in the motel room and looked out of the window. The sun was finally beginning to hide itself behind the crests and plateaus of the horizon, and a purplish glow was descending across the desert. Only a few stars, one of which was just the International Space Station, had appeared in the sky. Lance felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for the stars, for when calculating and measuring them had been his full-time job. For a moment, he forgot why he had changed his profession.

That was when he realized he was looking in the wrong place for answers, for the next puzzle piece. He wasn't going to find clues in the sky—they'd already fallen from there. They were somewhere on the ground, because that's where they'd fallen.

Finding where they'd fallen from was going to be a whole lot more difficult than finding where they were _stored_. When those agents came into the desert and took those pieces away, they had to bring them somewhere. Finding _that_ would be a whole lot more tangible than the wild theories Keith was coming up with, and it would get them closer to where they were heading in regards to the cover-up part of this case.

He stuffed the couple of photographs back into the plain file folder he'd been holding them in and forced that back into the briefcase that existed only to house their already overflowing files under the table and hurriedly pulled his jacket on. Kogane had said not to call him, so he wasn't about to. But this was the first major breakthrough he'd really had all on his own, and if Keith saw that he was really putting effort into the case, well… it would show that he had what it took to actually be an investigator, rather than a hanger-on. That was what he wanted, really. And it wouldn't make up for what he did, but it would be a step in the right direction. It had to be.

He finished getting his arm down the sleeve of his jacket and yanked open the door to the motel room with gusto, and took a step out of it to nearly collide with his partner. "K-Keith?"

Keith took a recoil step, his eyes wide with surprise for a half a moment before narrowing back to his resting half-glare. "Lance."

They both stared at each other for another brief moment before both speaking at once:

"I figured something out, something big."

"I know where we need to look next."

They caught each other's eyes again, and both found it hard to keep back the small grins tugging at their mouths.

* * *

 _ **Mulder** : You have to be willing to see._  
 _ **Scully** : I wish it were that simple._  
 _ **Mulder** : Scully, you have to believe me. Nobody else on this whole damn planet does or ever will. You're my one in five billion._


	8. Investigation

**Investigation**

* * *

 _A/N: Ty to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta!_

* * *

 **Fox Mulder** : I've seen too many things not to believe.  
 **Scully** : I've seen things, too. But there are answers to be found now. We have hope that there's a place to start. That's what I believe.  
 **Fox Mulder** : [ _sighing_ ] You put such faith in your science, Scully, but... from the things I've seen, science provides no place to start.  
 **Scully** : Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that's a place to start. That's where the hope is.

* * *

25

They were trundling down a dirt road not unlike the one they had gone down on the night of the meteor impacts. Keith sat in the passenger seat, a topographical map open on his lap and a GPS open on his phone, trying to cross-check locations on both. Lance had a small smile on his face and his grip tight on the wheel as they moved forward, dust kicking up behind the car in the waning light of the evening.

"I think I've got the locations," said Keith, using a pencil he'd tucked behind his ear to mark an X on the topographical map. "There are actually a few around here, and it'll just be a matter of—"

He was cut off as Lance hit a bump in the road and he was shot off of his seat a few inches, dropping both the pencil and his phone as he did. He grumbled as he picked them back up. Lance muttered only a half-hearted apology.

"There are three locations," said Keith, pushing his hair back from his face once he'd retrieved his fallen tools. "One is just a standard Department of Transportation building—I'm not expecting much there. Another is an old weather station that was built back in the 60s."

"What's the third one?" asked Lance.

"That's where it gets interesting," said Keith. "There's a third building listed here, but I had to search for it. I mean, whoever put this in the database really just wanted people to look right past it."

"They didn't count on someone as obsessive as you, did they?"

"No. Shut up. Anyway, it's just listed as 'Military Test Site.'"

"Nuclear?"

"I'm assuming." Keith looked from the map to the road and back again. "There were a bunch of places like it back in the 50s and 60s. Only a couple dozen, officially, but…"

"You think there were more?" Lance asked the question, but he knew the answer.

"Let's just say the site we're visiting isn't listed on Wikipedia."

"I guess I could've guessed that." He pointed up ahead, at the small shack off in the distance. "Is this one the weather station?"

"That should be it," said Keith, double-checking against his map. "Yeah, that's it."

In another minute or two, they were pulling into the small driveway to the building. The driveway wasn't much of anything, and was less discernible from the rest of the desert than the bumpy road they'd travelled out on was. The building itself looked like it was barely held together at all—the desert wind and dry dust had done their duty on the building, and it seemed like a stiff breeze would be all it would take to knock the whole structure over. The one thing that _didn't_ seem like it was falling apart was the array of antennae on the roof of the building. There were a few that extended straight up, and a few that branched out like old TV receivers. There were also a couple of satellites positioned near the back of the building. Though they still had the same thin film of dust that the rest of the building shared, they didn't seem to be as in danger of falling apart.

Keith barely waited for Lance to get out of the car before he began to power-walk toward the door, his hand hovering over where his gun was concealed. Lance closed his door behind him with a little more force than he needed to in his haste and jogged to catch up with Keith.

"What're you doing?" he asked, placing his hand on Keith's arm.

Keith jerked his arm away from Lance. "I'm going in. They could be holding sensitive information here."

"Yes," said Lance, keeping his voice even, " _or_ there is a weather lab in here. Let's start by asking questions rather than going in all hostile."

Keith scowled but pulled his hand away from his firearm. "Fine," he said, looking away from Lance to the side of the building. "You're probably right." He paused, and then: "And I don't see any other cars. I don't think anyone's here, anyway."

Lance nodded and let Keith take the lead again. Keith knocked on the door and, when no response came, tried the doorknob. The door opened easily, and Keith stepped inside, Lance following close behind.

The inside of the building looked about as what could be expected from a weather monitoring station. A few CRT monitors stood on the far side of the room, and there were a couple of smaller monitors against the left wall. A few desks stood, most of them clear but a few with some files left on them. A clock hung on the right wall over a door, the hands stopped at seven and nine.

The air in the room was stale, and both Keith and Lance found themselves walking a bit more carefully than they really needed to, being the only two there.

"Hello?" asked Lance, moving around the left side of the room as Keith went around the desks in the center to the right.

No one responded. Keith looked at a file left on one of the desks. It had a weather report on top, a slightly faded document detailing barometric pressure, humidity, and wind speed, among other things. "This is dated for 2005," said Keith.

Lance poked at one of the small monitors before turning to the desk closest to him. It was clean, but there was a day-by-day calendar propped up in the corner that was last pulled on September twenty-third, 2005. "Yeah, so's this calendar."

"There's enough dust in here…" said Keith, pulling his finger across the surface of the next desk over.

Lance pressed the power button on one of the CRT monitors, following up by pressing a few random keys on the keyboard propped in front of it. "I'm not sure this place even has any power anymore."

"Well," said Keith, turning around the room. Lance followed his gaze, and saw the specks of dust floating in the beams of light shining through small holes in between slats in the walls or through less-dusty areas of the windows.

Keith turned and tried pulling on the door under the clock, and after peeking inside, closed it again. "Bathroom," he said by way of explanation, and shrugged. "There are three other spots we still have to check," he said, "so I'm not too concerned that there's nothing here."

"I guess a few weather balloons actually are that," said Lance, grinning. Keith didn't find it as funny as Lance did, and Lance found himself frowning once Keith had turned back to the door to head back to the car.

Lance followed more slowly. He knew that it wasn't going to be immediate, Keith's forgiveness, especially after what he'd said to Shiro, but they were working together, finding real leads, and Lance was trying to find some levity in that. He wouldn't admit it aloud, but it hurt a little that Keith wouldn't work with him at least in lightening up the mood a bit.

He jogged a bit to follow Keith, closing the door to the weather station behind him and casting one last glance at the decrepit building before getting back in the car.

26

The Department of Transportation building was still occupied when they pulled up. A few pickup trucks were parked in the lot, some with the Department of Transportation logo on them, some without. There was a thin haze of orange dust all around them, kicked up by the trucks as they pulled in and out of the lot, presumably. As Lance and Keith stepped out of their car, however, the parking lot was still and quiet.

Keith led the way to the door. He looked like he was about to knock, but then he just went ahead and opened it.

They walked into a poorly air conditioned road that was lit by a row of fluorescents that ran down the center. They probably didn't need to be on at all, thanks to the large windows along one wall, but they gave off a soft, warm glow over the disorganized room. It was clear that this room wasn't really used for any actual _work_ , but for the workers that drove out on the roads to congregate. There were a few guys in tee shirts in the back of the room, one of whom had his boots propped up on the break room table. Off to the left, near an old-looking coffee machine and minifridge, stood a few more drivers, one of whom seemed to be telling the rest about her recent vacation to Corpus Christi. Everyone in the room looked to Keith and Lance as they stepped inside.

"Good afternoon," said Keith, handing up one hand in greeting. Lance pulled out his badge and flashed it to everyone in the room.

"We're with the FBI," said Lance, "and we just wanted to ask a few questions, if that's okay."

The employees grunted a few affirmative reactions, those around the coffee put turning back to each other so that the one talking about her vacation could continue with her story, which involved Bud Light Lime and a few Frisbees. Keith looked to Lance, then nodded toward the few men at the table near the back of the room. They headed over together.

"Hello," said Keith on approach. "I'm Agent Kogane, and this is Agent McClain. We'd just like to know a bit about any discrepancies in the roadways around here, any unusual traffic, or any disruptions—specifically at night."

The guys looked to each other before one in an old Van Halen tee shirt kicked his boots off of the table and leaned forward. "I know you two are sort of fresh around here, and I get it," he began, "but I don't think you'll find we have much traffic around here at all."

"Nothing unusual recently?"

"Nope." He leaned back in his chair and picked at his teeth with his pinky finger, looking to the agents. "Nothing more unusual than talking to the Feds, I mean."

This elicited some laughs from the others at the tables, and Keith shook his head, turning away from the table. "Thanks for your time," said Lance, following Keith as he moved toward the other group of people.

"Afternoon," said Keith, cutting off the recent vacation-goer in the middle of her story. "We're just going to need a minute."

"Um… _okay_?" said the woman who'd been speaking, crossing her arms across her chest. She had the residual color of a spray tan on her skin, visible beneath her still-new Corpus Christi tee shirt. She raised an eyebrow, and Lance saw it obvious that she definitely didn't think their investigation was any more important than her vacation.

"Have you seen anything unusual lately?" asked Keith. "Traffic patterns, disruptions in the roadways…"

"Nothing like that," said the woman, dismissing them with her eyes, trying to turn from them to the rest of the group. Keith started, as if he were about to say something, but Lance nudged him out of the way.

"Did I hear you say that you just got back from Corpus Christi?" asked Lance. The woman turned back to face him. She grinned a half-smile.

"Yeah, maybe," she said. "What's it to you?"

"Oh, not much, just I went there last February, and it was a _great_ time."

"It really is!" she said, her shoulders relaxing and her face softening. "I was a little unsure of what the sun would do to me, but John—that's my husband, see—he said I was out in the sun all day here, too, and I guess he was right. Plus, and don't go spreading this around, but the spray tan was a little bit of help, too." She said this with a wink, and Lance offered her a polite laugh in response.

"I could hardly tell!" he said, grinning a charming smile. He leaned in, brushing the woman's arm with his hand as he did. "What was your favorite spot to eat? I found the seafood just _delectable_."

"Oh! I found this great place for shrimp, right by the shore, and John, he didn't want to go, but I told him that this was the kind of place you had to go if you wanted to eat well, the way the locals did!" Lance nodded along, making sure she knew he was listening. "So we went, and it was great—I mean, John got food poisoning, but that could've been the mayonnaise on his sandwich earlier in the day. Who knows, when you're out of town? You know how it is."

"You've got _that_ right," said Lance, laughing along with her. "I'm feeling it around here, really."

"Oh really, where are you from?"

"Arizona, actually."

"Not too far!" The woman playfully slapped him on the arm. "Well, I can recommend a few things, if you're looking for some good food. Like Pip's—it's this little Italian place out in one of the residential neighborhoods in the northwest of town. You'd not even _notice_ it if you didn't know where it was, but it's worth checking out. Take Benjamin Street up from Main and then the third left. It'll be right on your right." She gave a slight laugh, as if saying the word "right" twice was a joke of some sort. She gave Lance another playful slap on the arm before her brow furrowed. "But don't take Route 84 back—there've been some issues out there lately. The army's been using it for Hummer practice or something, and it feels like it's always during my commute. It's a bitch to deal with."

She sighed, rolling her eyes. "What'd you say your name was, again?" she said. Her eyes darted down his fame quickly in a way that almost made Lance feel self-conscious.

"Agent McClain," he said, but he checked his wrist fast enough that she would not have been able to tell he wasn't wearing a watch. "But it looks like Agent Kogane and I have another engagement elsewhere." He offered a small frown. "I'm so sorry I can't spend more time talking—it's been a pleasure…"

"Deenah."

"Deenah. Have a great afternoon."

He led Keith out of the Department of Transportation building just after, and Keith stayed silent until they got into the car. Once they pulled out of the parking lot, Keith turned to Lance.

"What was that?"

"What?"

"Were you flirting with her?"

"Yeah, a little," said Lance, grinning despite himself. "I mean, it doesn't mean anything. She's married. And she vacations in Corpus Christi. Who does that?"

"You do?"

"I was lying, Keith." Lance rolled his eyes. "I was getting information out of her. She wasn't willing to talk to you."

"They didn't know anything, anyway."

"Hey, conspiracy theory man. You tell me: are there any government bases out on Route 84?"

A silence hung between them for a moment as Keith rustled through his map and quickly referenced his cell phone. He looked to Lance. "No, but…"

"So I'd say I figured something out that might be right up your alley. If the government's covering it up, they're going to need a base of operations nearby."

Keith didn't say anything at that, simply circling the section of Route 84. He traced his finger down from that circle to where he'd put the X on the old nuclear facility. He frowned. "It looks like our old nuclear facility isn't along 84, which means that it might not be where we're going."

"That makes sense," said Lance, pulling off of the dirt road and back onto the paved road that led back into town. "You still want to check out the third site?"

"I'll admit your detective work was good back there," said Keith, "but our best lead is still this place." His finger was pressed down against the map, pinpointing the X on the facility he wasn't able to get much information on. He turned to Lance. "There might be tight security here, because what the government has here isn't something they want the public to stumble upon."

Lance nodded. He drove the forward in silence for a moment before he smirked.

"What?" asked Keith.

"We _are_ the government, kind of," he said.

"We're—we're not…" Keith trailed off, pretending to look back at his map as he slouched in the passenger seat of the car.

27

The dirt road they needed to follow to get to the abandoned nuclear facility was so worn and dust-covered that Lance actually drove past it before he had to make a U-turn to go back for it.

"Wait, there it is!" said Keith, pointing through the windshield at a barely-discernible indent in the desert. Lance squinted toward where his partner was pointing and was able to find his way onto the long driveway.

There weren't any markers along the road, and Lance had to pay close attention to where he was going in order to keep on track. He was getting a bit worried that he was even going in the right direction when he saw a chain link fence ahead of him, stretching in both sides through the desert. There was a gate across the road, and beyond it Lance could see the road stretch a little further on. There were no other markers or indications that there was anything different from the rest of the desert except for this fence, that the fence was actually enclosing anything at all.

Lance pulled up to the gate and parked the car, and both he and Keith exited to examine the gate.

There was a large sign on the gate that had, at one point, been a bright yellow with red lettering, but the desert had faded it to a dull, patchy yellow that was showing through with rust, and the lettering was only half-discernible: "GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. DO NOT ENTER UNDER PENALTY OF LAW."

Beneath this was a padlock and chain that held together the two sides of the gate. "Hold on," said Keith, heading around to the trunk of their rental sedan and returning with a set of bolt cutters. He walked past Lance as if this were completely normal and, after a brief moment of struggle pushing together on the bolt cutters' handles, Keith snapped off the gate's padlock. He pulled the chain through the links and threw it to the ground just off of the road. He began to push the gate open when he caught Lance's eyes and saw the shocked expression on his face.

"What?" asked Keith. "You said we were basically the government anyway." He pushed the side of the gate all the way open. "We just happened to have forgotten our keys."

Lance hesitated for a moment, watching his partner bring his bolt cutters back to the trunk of the car, and he shrugged before pushing open his side of the gate, as well. It was already unlocked, after all.

They rolled slowly through the gate, both on the lookout for any signs that their entrance might have been detected, but it seemed like their suspicions of this facility being abandoned were pretty warranted.

There was a long stretch to drive between the fence and anything even resembling a building. Whatever this thing was, it was clear that the government didn't want anyone simply stumbling upon it, or catching a glimpse of it from the road.

Ahead of them, a nondescript, box-like gray building rose from the desert. It was only one story high and had no windows, just a metal door on the front and another metal door and a garage door on the side, near the back. Unlike the Department of Transportation building, this one had not vehicles in the nonexistent parking lot.

Lance pulled the car up to the single door and parked. He pulled his suit jacket off and he exited the car, folding it over the seat. "I figure this place doesn't have any air conditioning," he said with a grin. Keith almost seemed to smile back as he shucked his jacket as well.

They reached the door and Keith tried the door handle, finding it locked. He shook his head. "Let's try around back."

They walked around to the side of the building, where the garage door and the side entrance were located. Lance tried the door handle on the side door to find it to be just as locked as the front door.

"Locked?" asked Keith. Lance nodded. "Let's see if we can get through the garage door."

Keith was squatting at the base of the door, working his fingertips underneath it. "Wait a sec, Kogane," said Lance. Keith looked up to him but did not withdraw his fingers.

"What?"

"What if this _is_ just a nuclear testing site?" He saw Keith's eyebrows narrow a bit, and he held up his hands in defense. "I mean, you said the government has a ton of unlisted nuclear sites. Not every one of them is going to be the spot for an alien conspiracy. They could be regular conspiracies."

"And you don't want to know, either way?"

Lance was ready to shoot back a retort, something about radiation and Keith's lost brain cells, but he held himself back. He had to admit that he _was_ curious. He hesitated a moment more, Keith looking up at him the whole time, before sighing and squatting down next to Keith, putting his fingers into the tiny gap between the door and the floor, as well.

"One, two, _three_ …" counted Keith, and they both lifted up as hard as they could, in unison. The door lifted a few inches off of the ground and then was abruptly halted by a chain latched on the inside of the door. Keith squatted down a little further to see the chain extending from a ring inset to the concrete floor of the garage reaching up to the inside of the door.

"Hold that," said Keith as he let go of the door without any real warning. Lance strained for a second, almost dropping the whole weight of the door onto his fingers. He felt a pull in his back as he kept the door open the little bit by himself.

"Yeah, thanks for the heads up!" Lance shouted after Keith, who disappeared around the front of the building. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead, and resisted the ache in his arms and thighs as he held the door open those few inches.

It seemed like an _eternity_ before his partner rounded the building again, and as he approached, Lance could see that Keith was carrying with him the bolt cutters he had used to get them into the compound in the first place.

Kneeling down, Keith slid the bolt cutters right underneath the door and, after a moment of effort, was able to snap through the chain. He withdrew the bolt cutters and looked up to Lance.

"Come on," said Lance, "grab ahold!" He wasn't able to hold it on his own for much longer. Keith got to his feet and squatted down next to him, helping him to pull the garage door open all the way. It was a heavy, metal plated door, and it took them more than a little effort to push it up high enough for them to move underneath. Lance nodded to Keith, and he slipped underneath, holding onto the door while Keith slipped under just after. When they were both through, Lance let the door fall, his arms feeling like rubber.

The inside of the building was dark, the lack of windows leaving no natural light to come into the space. Lance wished he'd brought a flashlight with him or _something_ , but Keith opened up his cell phone's flashlight in seconds. Lance realized this was the obvious solution and did the same just after.

The room was mainly empty. It was definitely a garage—there were a few shelves near the back of the room, as well as a toolbox that must have been kept there for whatever cars or trucks stopped here. All of the walls were a plain cement that matched the smooth cement floor. In the back of the room was another door, this one with a reinforced glass window. Keith led the way to it, and turned the handle to find that it was unlocked. Lance followed him through it to the main area of the building.

This room took up most of the space in the building that was not taken up by the garage. There were six lab tables, clean black counter spaces, that held on them a couple of different scientific instruments: some beakers, a few electric microscopes, and some older-looking desktop computers. On one wall hung a row of lead-lined aprons, the type that doctors wore when taking x-rays.

Both agents swept the beams of their cell phone flashlights across the space. Keith and Lance moved to different lab tables to see if they could find anything relevant to their investigation, but the tables had been cleaned up after whatever had last occurred here, and there was nothing that particularly helped them, nothing that indicated at all what had taken place here.

Lance thumbed the power button on the desktop computer and monitor, but there was no response from them. It made sense—they were at a supposedly decommissioned and nondescript government facility. There was no real reason for anything to be powered or working.

"Keep looking around," said Lance, "I'm going to check the rest of the building.

Keith nodded to him in the beam of his flashlight, and Lance moved from the lab tables and main work area to the back of the building, near where the garage was. There was a small area unaccounted for by the larger room in the back of the building. Part of this was taken up by a bathroom, but there was a space in between the bathroom and the garage that was too wide to just be a wall. Lance knocked on the wall gently, not wanting to make too much noise even in the abandoned building. The sound that came back to him was hollow.

He glanced back to Keith, who was carefully inspecting the different instruments and tools left on the desks. He was occupied enough to be busy while Lance checked out this empty area. Lance moved from the main room to the garage to find if there was any resonance on that wall, as well.

He knocked on the wall in between the empty shelves on the back side of the garage and found the same empty _thud_ that he found when knocking in the other room. This was not a solid wall at all. There was something hidden in this part of the building, something that the government might not have even wanted its own secret employees from knowing about.

He took a step back and looked at the wall he was probing. There was nothing on it, a smooth, concrete block wall, except for the shelves that lined it. They were wooden with metal brackets holding them up, and they seemed like they might have once held things such as tools, motor oil, and extra wiper fluid—standard garage stuff. However, they were all cleared now.

Lance felt around on the top shelf, and felt nothing but a thin layer of dust. It was a layer of fine particulates, settling from the dry desert air. He withdrew his hand and looked over the set of shelves. There was nothing strange about them, but there had to be _some_ clue as to what lay beyond the wall. There was something there, he knew it.

Lance leaned an elbow on one of the shelves and crossed one ankle behind the other, facing the door the garage and thinking. There would be _something_ in the garage…

He almost dropped his phone and the light coming from it as his elbow pushed the shelf downward. At first, he thought it was the old wood breaking beneath his weight, but as he less-than-gracefully caught his balance, he saw the way that the shelf rotated around a central support, its endpoints pivoting around, until both ends touched the top and bottom of the shelves below and above it.

Lance glanced quickly to the door to the other room, where Keith was continuing his investigation, and turned his attention back to the shelf. He held it between his hands and pushed it just a bit more in the way it was twisting, and something within the wall sounded a quiet _click_. The dust to Lance's right was disturbed by a slight breeze. He looked to the side of the shelves, and sure enough, there was a tiny crack in the cement block wall just by the edge of the toolbox.

Lance pulled on the shelf he had turned, and the wall pivoted toward him, revealing a previously hidden secret passage. Cement stairs led downward from the opening in the garage wall. Lance shined his cell phone flashlight down the new opening. The stairs went down another fifteen feet or so before terminating at a plain metal door not unlike those on the outside of the building.

"Keith?" he called to the other room. He heard some sort of a response but wasn't really listening as he took a few tentative steps downward into the hidden passage.

"McClain, what is it? You couldn't just bring it to me—"

Keith cut off as he entered the garage, stopping at the top of the stairs.

"Lance, what…"

Lance turned back to Keith, his eyes wide. Keith didn't say anything else; he swung his cell phone flashlight beam down the stairs toward where Lance was going, as well. He stepped carefully behind Lance, and they descended the stairs together.

Lance glanced over his shoulder to Keith as he put his hand on the door handle, and Keith nodded. Lance turned the handle and opened the door into the basement level of the facility.

Both agents stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind them. In front of them were shelves. Not just a few, but _dozens_ of shelves, all stacked with folders and ledgers and other paperwork, stretching back into the basement area, which was clearly much larger than the building above it, as far as their cell phone flashlights reached. The air was cooler down here, but that was not where the chill Lance felt originated.

"This isn't a nuclear weapons testing facility," he said, his eyes wide as he swept the beam of light around the room.

"No," said Keith, "it's not. It's something much, much more dangerous."

* * *

 **Melissa Scully** : Why is it so dark in here?  
 **Mulder** : The lights aren't on.


	9. Found

_A/N: Sorry for the long break in updates! I was going to update, and actually had most of this chapter written since August, but I got a job and then NaNoWriMo happened and ANYWAY it's here now! I am excited for the ~big revelations~ and mystery in this chapter, which will hopefully just make it more interesting going forward!_

 _Ty to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta!_

* * *

 **Chapter Nine: Found**

* * *

 **Mulder** : If coincidences are coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?

* * *

28

Lance leaned against one of the shelves as he thumbed through the file. It was old—it was typewritten and most of the dates detailed in it were from the mid-1950s. They were mainly vague descriptions of locations, limes, and events. Some of them were half-gibberish, written in what Lance could only assume was some sort of a code. This had evidently been significant confidential information at the height of Cold War paranoia, and had been duly protected.

He replaced the file on the shelf where he had found it, glancing as he did down to his partner, who was flipping furiously through a ledger of some sort. Lance moved a little way down his row, knowing that he would find the same unintelligible stuff if he kept looking in the same spot.

He went down the stacks, away from Keith, and took a right, heading down two aisles to another row, where he meandered down a bit further before pulling a manila folder out at random. He flipped through a few pages, finding them to be a bit newer than the previous folders. They were typed by a computer or word processor, that was plain to see, rather than a typewriter. The dates of the pages were in the early to mid-nineties, which mean that this facility itself had been used a whole lot more recently than it seemed to have been.

This file was not a list of locations, however, as the previous folders had been. Instead, this had names—names of all genders and ethnic origin, from what Lance could tell—as well as what seemed to be vital statistics and social security numbers before a chunk of text in that coded language he couldn't make out. He scanned over it to see if there was something he could recognize from the previous gibberish he'd looked over, but there were no similarities that he could pick out.

There was something that stood out to him, though. He called Keith over.

"What?" asked Keith.

" _Come here_ ," pressed Lance, unable to take his eyes off of the file he currently held in his hand. He heard the footsteps and saw the cell phone flashlight beam as Keith approached, but he didn't look up to him.

" _What_?" asked Keith, crossing his arms over his chest.

Lance handed him the file, held open to the page that had caught his eye. Keith jerked it away from him. He shone his cell phone flashlight over the sheet, and his narrowed eyes widened as he saw what was written.

"Is this real?" asked Keith, not looking up to Lance as he asked it, unable to pull his eyes away from the document.

Lance nodded. "As real as anything else we've found here."

"Well…" started Keith, but there wasn't more for him to add to his statement. His hands were close to shaking, but he was practiced enough in keeping his emotions controlled that Lance didn't see even a little tremor in his fingers.

"This file, it's… it's got my name." Keith lowered the file and looked to Lance. "This file is about _me._ "

Keith's eyes were wide, a mixture of confusion and fear in his expression, one Lance registered as the most vulnerable he had ever seen his partner. He opened his mouth, about to say something, when the lights came to life all around them, filling the whole underground warehouse with light.

"Someone's here," whispered Lance.

The words didn't seem to register with Keith, who just looked back to the folder in continued stunned silence. Lance swiped his phone's flashlight off and tucked it into his pocket, reaching over to Keith. He caught his arm and pulled Keith to look him in the eye again.

"Keith," he said, still whispering, but with a level and measure countenance. "We need to go. _Now_."

Lance's partner didn't seem to respond to this, and Lance could hear the echoing sound of footsteps entering the room. Lance glanced over Keith's shoulder, down in the direction where they had entered from. His eyes darted anxiously back to Keith.

He hesitated for a moment, then reached out and grabbed Keith's hand, the one holding his cell phone with the flashlight still on, and pulled him forward.

Keith's hand closed reflexively around the folder— _his_ folder—and clasped around Lance's hand, as well, allowing himself to be led down the rows of files and ledgers.

From somewhere behind them, in the direction of the entrance, Lance heard someone call out, and the other footsteps quickened. There were at least two sets of footsteps, but Lance couldn't tell much more than just that. He pulled Keith down a side-passage and into another aisle of shelves, pausing for a brief moment to catch his breath.

He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose, the way one of his old classmates had taught him back in Quantico. He had been struggling through some of the training on a particularly foggy early morning, a long run with added obstacles, and the fellow FBI trainee had slapped him on the back before relaying the tip he'd gotten from his high school track coach. It was a simple breathing trick that would help his lungs to absorb more oxygen more quickly.

That was all well and good, but Lance knew that the main reason he was employing this particular technique right now was that it was also the quietest way to breathe when his chest was rising and falling after the quick burst of cardio.

He glanced over at Keith, who seemed to be staring forward and down at one of the shelves in front of him without actually looking at anything at all. Lance became hyper-conscious of his hand, clasped around Keith's wrist, and pulled it away as carefully as he could, as to not elicit any loud responses from his partner. Keith's hand pulled back a bit as Lance let it go, and this cast a shadow of Lance's hand against the shelf behind them, the flash on the camera shining brightly.

"Over there," came a voice from closer than Lance was hoping the other people in the room had made it. They were whispering, but when he was on edge, his heart making the only other sound in the room, thumping in his ears, that whisper seemed louder than a sonic boom. He quickly put a hand over the flash on Keith's camera. This was followed by the footsteps stopping for just a moment before quickening.

"They're coming," whispered Lance, leaning into Keith so he could be even quieter even as he tried to swipe the flashlight off and push his partner to get moving again.

Keith said nothing, and Lance was able to easily wriggle his phone out of his hand. His fingers twitched, but otherwise mostly dangled uselessly as Lance pulled the phone up to where he could see it and swiped the light off.

"Let's _go_."

Keith allowed himself to be pushed forward and even started to jog as Lance nudged him forward. Lance could hear every tiny squeak of his rubber soles against the concrete floor of the basement warehouse floor, and he hoped that it was just his paranoia and not something that the people chasing them could also pick up on.

He pushed Keith again with the palm of his hand, softly but forcefully, and got him to change direction and begin down a new aisle. Lance could see the folder, still in his hand, and knew that this moment was probably the biggest turning point in Keith's whole life. It would probably be better for them to stop and take a moment to talk about it, discuss it, cope with it at all…

But they were also trespassing in a top-secret federal facility and would most definitely be lucky if they were tried for treason and sentenced to life in prison if they were caught. That was if they made it far enough to be sentenced. He directed Keith down a new aisle.

They were getting closer and closer to the back of the warehouse of shelves. It was a large room, but it was still finite, and that meant that they were going to have to, at some point, turn around and get past the people chasing them. That would mean, at some point, crossing their line of vision down one of the aisles. Lance somehow felt his heart begin to beat even harder.

From somewhere behind them, he could hear the sound of a slew of papers and folders cascading out of the shelves and onto the concrete floor. He was pretty sure he could also hear one of the people following them curse, " _Shit!_ " quickly around the same time.

"Keith," he whispered, leaning close over Keith's shoulder without slowing down, "we need to get back to the entrance." He paused. "Please, we'll deal with the folder later."

Keith didn't appear to hear him at all, and Lance swallowed a scowl of frustration. There would be time to get frustrated later. For now, he had to focus on survival. One of them had to.

He reached one of the aisles—which looked the exact same as the rest of them, with the same width and height and all—and jerked Keith down it behind him, grabbing ahold of his wrist again. He could feel his legs pounding, and he still was careful to touch down on the floor on the balls of his feet to best stay quiet.

He padded forward a bit more before taking a quick glance over his shoulder and then darting forward, running as quickly and quietly as he could back _toward_ the entrance to the basement, toward the stairs that led up back into the desert. He could only hope that they'd be able to make it out past the people who were in pursuit.

Lance clasped his hand tight around Keith's, feeling the cool of Keith's hand even in the heat of the desert building. He pulled him forward and stopped only briefly when the shelf next to him exploded in a shower of papers as a bullet found its home there, a few inches from where his head had just been.

He tensed, ducking down a bit, and then immediately began running again, even faster. This was good because Keith, apparently finally shaken out of his daze by the gunshot, was practically dragging him forward by the hand. Lance almost stumbled, but he found his legs, longer than Keith's but still somehow still struggling to keep up, back underneath him just as a few more gunshots rang out from behind him.

 _Oh, well, I guess they've found us now_ , thought Lance as Keith ducked down one of the side-shelves. Lance ducked down after him into the stacks. A moment later he squeezed Keith's hand. Keith's head whipped around, and Lance nodded to the shelf next to them. He wasn't sure if Keith would catch his meaning, but to his surprise, Keith actually took the lead, throwing his shoulder into the shelf. Lance followed along, pushing his shoulder into the long shelf, which was much more solid than he had thought it would be.

After a moment—and in that moment, Lance could feel the perspiration beading up on his face—the shelf began to move. Slowly, at first, but then cascading, knocking into the next shelf, which in turn knocked into the following, rolling over each other like giant conspiracy dominoes.

The gun went off again as another person cried out. Lance paused a moment as one of the people pursuing them let out another shout, and then he grabbed Keith's hand, pulling Keith ahead, toward that door in the corner. Keith allowed himself to be led at first, but then picked up pretty quickly on what he needed to do if he wanted to escape.

When they had made it past the last of the shelves to the door, Lance stopped for a moment to look back at the havoc they'd caused. The back half of the now-lit underground warehouse room was in a state of total disarray, and he could see the shape of some people struggling against the bookshelves that had been pushed down on top of them. For a half a moment, Lance considered going back and helping them up, instead of leaving them there.

Then, he remembered the gunshots, and thought that they could rot in this basement for all he cared.

"McClain, let's go!" hissed Keith, who was already halfway up the stairs. Lance took one last glance at the warehouse, and then he powered up the stairs behind Keith. They both sprinted out of the garage, and when they'd gotten outside, they found a large black SUV with tinted windows parked a dozen feet away from their rental car. As they approached, Lance ducked down quickly to make sure that their tires hadn't been slashed or anything. When he saw that it was fine, he stood up to take the wheel.

Keith was already in the driver's seat, and the car was starting. Lance rushed around to the other side and slid into the passenger's seat.

"Are you okay to drive?" he asked.

His partner replied by shifting into reverse and pressing the gas pedal all the way to the floor, skidding slightly on the desert sand as he turned around before shifting into drive—almost grinding the gears as he did—and pulling away from the secret facility.

29

Lance felt like he had just chugged an entire cup of coffee. His nerves were on fire, his skin felt like it was crawling beneath the clammy, nervous sweat, and his heart was beating like a drum. He could practically feel the anxiety as it spread through his body, now that they were free of the immediate danger, and he couldn't even begin to imagine what Keith must have felt like.

They hadn't said anything in the car, but when they'd gotten back into town, Keith had immediately gone not to their motel but to Pidge and Hunk's house, where the three of them had regrouped and gone to return the rental car. The worst thing that they could have done was to hold onto the one thing by which they could be immediately identified in the small town. As they did this, Lance went back to the motel to retrieve their things. There was not much—just a bag each—but he didn't relish walking across the desert town back to Pidge and Hunk's house with them.

When he had finished all of the work, he had been hot, tired, and sweating, and the excitement of the whole day was wearing off.

That was how he had ended up in the bar. It was called "Jeanie's," but he wasn't sure that there actually was a Jeanie. There was one man behind the bar, and he didn't seem to want to make much conversation beyond asking what Lance wanted to drink before going back to the other end of the near-empty bar to polish glasses.

There were a few other people in the bar, including a couple of middle aged people who must have just come off of work who had some beers and were playing on an obviously tilted shuffleboard that was poorly balanced by a variety of beer-stained coasters. Lance looked down at his own drink—a domestic lager he'd ordered at the last minute when he decided that this bar wasn't going to have any of the more extravagant mixed drinks he'd normally have ordered—and took a sip. It didn't taste as good as a double pomegranate cosmo-rita, but it was cold and it went down really well after the day he had just experienced.

There was something in those files that they weren't supposed to know about. What _that_ was, they weren't any closer to figuring out. All they had was the details that the files had contained, a jumble of coded nonsense, and the knowledge that _whatever_ this database was, Keith was somehow included.

That was what made this more… urgent. There was a fire lit underneath them, so-to-say, to figure out what exactly these files were about. They needed to know because Kogane was involved, and there was no way that they were going to be able to just approach this case from a detached, objective point of view.

Keith was with the conspiracy theorists, and they were probably taking care of him—they were nice, at least, even if some of the things they said didn't make much sense. Hunk would be able to make sure that Keith was comfortable, and Pidge would be able to make sure that he was distracted by some other interesting discovery, but…

Lance did feel some guilt not being there with them right now. He should have been there, to try to begin to work out what was going on with this document _with_ Keith, figure out what was the significance of the code, why it was there, what _any_ of this was. But he needed some space to think, in this moment—he wanted to be able to be able to come up with a rational explanation, or at least a theory, before he spoke with Keith about this again. That way, he'd be able to ground him better, and they would be able to more forward more constructively.

At least, that was what he told himself. Whether or not it was just because he was afraid because he didn't know what to say to someone who was suddenly implicated in a huge government conspiracy he'd been obsessively investigating. He wouldn't know what was right to say to Keith, and he found that more and more, he didn't want to say the wrong thing.

These were the thoughts he had lost himself in when someone approached him and sat down on the stool next to him. He only looked up when this person ordered a drink, because with a mostly-empty bar, it wasn't often that someone would take the set right next to another stranger.

He looked to her and was almost dumbstruck. She was tall, first of all, with dark skin and white, curly hair pulled back into a tight bun under a plain black baseball cap. Her lightweight jacket seemed mainly to protect from the sand of the desert than any heat, otherwise she would have been very overheated in the warmth of Cairn, despite the chilly nights. The bartender poured her the Jack on the rocks and lingered a moment longer than he had with Lance before returning to the far side of the bar.

"Well, hello," said Lance, immediately switching gears to fall into his comfortable and familiar way of speaking with women in bars. "How did a pretty lady like you end up _here_?"

She took a deep drink out of her drink without looking at him before placing the now almost-empty glass down on the bar in front of her. She paused a moment, and then, as if scripted, she said "Special Agent Lance McClain, you must understand that you're in over your head."

Lance froze. He didn't know this woman or where she had come from, but the fact that she knew who he was and was commenting—he assumed—on what had happened today told him that she was much more than she appeared to be.

"I don't know what you mean," said Lance, his hand clamping around his cool beer just so that it wouldn't tremble. If she was with the government, an undercover agent from that group that seemed to also be pursuing the meteors, that meant that he was in about as much danger as was possible. His mind flitted to Keith, and he realized he was worried about Keith's safety, that there wasn't any agent trying to pin him down at the same time.

"Just know this, Agent McClain," said the woman, still not looking to him, "You have the potential for many allies in what you're doing." She picked up the class in front of her and drained the rest of it. Then, she turned to him for the first time, and he was struck by the depth of her large, gray eyes. "You also have the potential for many more enemies. Tread carefully. We're watching."

With this, she stood and left. Lance wanted to watch her go, but he found that he was staring at the place where she had been sitting, the now-empty seat with the empty glass in front of it. She wasn't from the government, that much was true. She must have been part of the group Keith had theorized, someone who would try to get to the meteorites before the government could. His partner needed to know about this. They had potential allies, at least, which was good because it opened up the possibility of more information on this whole situation.

It also meant that this whole case had become a hell of a lot more complicated.

"Are you going to pay for her drink, or…?" asked the bartender, and Lance shelled out some cash for him without much thought at all. He left his own beer unfinished and walked quickly from Jeanie's. He had a phone call to make.

30

"I have a few questions," said Lance, leaning against the chain-link fence around the lot next to the diner he and Keith had dined at just the other day, a little way down the street from Jeanie's. The desert sky was a purplish shade of dark, and the starts were just beginning to show.

" _You_ have questions?" came the gruff voice from the other end of the line. "I have had seven phone calls asking me to tell them all about you two. And none of them tell me who they are, just that they're of a higher rank than me. I've faced the strangest threats I've ever heard, and I am legitimately worried by them."

"Ross, I—"

"On top of all of that," he said, not letting Lance get a word in, "I told you not to call me."

He was right, and Lance knew that, but…

"I need you to listen. Something happened—the government has a huge warehouse of encoded files, including one with Kogane's information, and it's linked to the Kerberos mission…"

"Are you kidding me?" asked Ross. "I sent you out there to stop this conspiracy theory bullshit, to keep Kogane in check. And there's something here, but I don't want you drinking his alien invasion Kool-Aid."

"Sir, I…"

"Listen, McClain: I'll hold them off. You're smart, and so is Kogane. But I can't do it forever." He sighed. "Figure it out, but be smart about it."

"Yes, sir, but…"

The other end of the line was dead. He jammed his phone in his pocket and looked upward. The sky was clear in Cairn, as it usually was, and he could see the constellations forming in his brain as he scanned the stars, connecting into a full interwoven tapestry of myths. Between all of these myths, a truth connected everything in the sky. The science of the stars, their places in the universe, their processes over billions of years—they were all explainable phenomena.

He began walking toward Hunk and Pidge's house, where he was sure Keith still was. They had to get back together and work toward pulling their own explanation out of these stories.

* * *

 **Mulder** : Sometimes the only sane answer to an insane world is insanity.

* * *

 _A/N: ALSO: I'll be writing a piece for the digital version of the Lancito! zine. It's a Lance-centric charity zine that's being created to benefit Cuba and Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastating recent hurricane season. You can find out more about it on tumblr: lancitozine_


	10. Connection

_A/N: I thought I would do one last update before the end of 2017! I have to say, this fic just keeps on growing more and more into what I want it to be, and I'm glad that others seem to enjoy it, as well! It's been over a year since I started it (in the fall of 2016), and I can't wait to see it continue to grow and evolve into the next year! A continued thanks to everyone who reads, reviews, and faves-thank you all so much for all of your support!_

* * *

 **Chapter Ten: Connection**

* * *

 **Mulder** : Scully, you're making this personal.

 **Dana Scully** : Because it is personal, Mulder. Because without the FBI personal interest is all that I have. And if you take that away than there is no reason for me to continue.

* * *

31

"I don't know of any other conspiracy group around here—or hell, even across the country—that fits that M.O.," said Pidge, pushing their glasses up their nose and not pausing to stop typing, even as they spoke. "I'll double-check the databases I have access to, but this seems like it's something new."

"Sort of like how this shady unknown government agency is something new," said Lance, gesturing casually with his hand as he leaned against the counter.

Pidge let out a sibilant laugh, and Keith silently shook his head. Hunk stepped forward. "McClain, these sort of covert organizations aren't really new news to us." He fiddled with his hands. "They actually are a central idea of _most_ conspiracy theories."

Lance held up his hands in defense, so Hunk Laid off. Keith now took the opportunity to speak up.

"The point is, this new group seems to know about what's going on here and—if what they told Lance is true—they're watching our progress." He crossed his arms across his chest. "Though we do know, from the documents from before, that they have intercepted the meteors before—even had run-ins with the government agents."

"Which leads me to wonder why _we_ hadn't met them before this," said Lance. "I mean, we've been investigating the same thing, and if we are at odds with the government agents…"

"I think that's precisely why they dropped back to watch," said Keith. "Plus, _we're_ technically government agents, too. But they wouldn't have just fallen back if they thought we would work in any way contrary to what they wanted."

"They just kept watching all of us until they could determine whether or not we would be dangerous to their own operations," said Hunk. Then, he nervously added: "Whatever their operations are."

"But we still have to figure out what the connections are," said Lance. "Between the Kerberos mission, the files we found in the basement warehouse, the meteors, and this new group."

Keith uncrossed his arms so that he could slam his fist into the wall behind him. "Damn it," he said. "We need to decode those files."

"It's no code I've ever seen," said Hunk, shrugging. "And if it's as secret as it is, we know that the codes are going to be at _least_ double-safe."

"That's what _I've_ been working on," said Pidge, cracking their fingers. "Now, behold the work of the amazing Doctor Gunderson."

They leaned back in their office chair in order to allow the others to see what they had produced on the screen. The website open looked to be a standard conspiracy theory website: a dark background with relatively unformatted text in a simple layout. At the top of the page were the words "CODE TALKERS" in all caps.

"What is this?" asked Lance, squinting at the screen.

"Code talkers are a very specific type of agent used by the U.S. military in the World Wars, mostly to convey messages by radio in extremely complex code." Pidge looked to the astrophysicist through their large lenses. "These codes were largely unbreakable, because to everyone else, they seemed to be gibberish."

"Well, we already know it's in code," said Lance, "so it only makes sense that some sort of a 'code talker' wrote the code."

"No, Lance, you don't get it," said his partner, nodding along with what Pidge had said. "If what Pidge is saying is correct, then we're facing a much more complicated code than we could have even conceived of before."

"What do you mean?" asked Lance, getting frustrated. "You're being more cryptic than the code is."

"Listen, McClain," said Pidge, "back during the World Wars, Native Americans who could speak their cultures' languages were recruited to be code talkers for the United States military, mostly the Marines. Because many of the languages never had a written form, it was next to impossible to write a dictionary, guide, or codex. This allowed a ton of secret military shit to happen, and because of the nature of these languages, many of the codes were never broken."

"So where does that leave us?" asked Lance. "I don't speak any native languages!"

"None of us do," said Keith. "That's the _point_."

"So what do we do now?" asked Lance. "We know what kind of a code it is, yeah, but we still have no idea how to break it."

Keith stepped forward. "Pidge, do you know what language _specifically_ this is in?"

"I've been trying to narrow it down," said Pidge. "Even though these languages were usually not written down they were often coded through the NATO phonetic alphabet for clearer transmissions. I've been cross-referencing the code we found with the tribal websites a lot of Native American tribes have these days, and I think I've begun to narrow it down." They swiveled around and punched a few more things into the keyboard. "The trouble is that I think it's coded again. Like, the message is in another code other than the native language."

"Okay, and it's a long shot, but…" Hunk fidgeted with his hands for a moment before continuing. "There's this girl I… I went to college with, and we've been keeping in contact lately, and…"

"Spit it out," said Keith. Both Lance and Pidge shot him a glare.

"A-anyway, Shay is Navajo, and her grandma is a part of the tribe's historical efforts. So…"

"Do you think she'd help us?" asked Pidge.

"Of course," said Hunk. "I—that is, she'll be more than happy to help. That's just the type of person she is."

"Well then," said Lance, rubbing his hands together. "Let's call her."

32

A little while later, the two FBI agents found themselves relegated to the guest room, which was clearly never meant to accommodate guests. Hunk had moved a few old CPUs out of the way, as well as more than a couple books and rolled-up maps. This room, though it _did_ hold an extra bed, seemed to be more of a large storage closet than an actual guest room.

Clearing enough stuff to the side of the room to facilitate Hunk's air mattress he usually brought camping had taken a lot of maneuvering, but Hunk hadn't let them help him at all. According to him, they were guests in his house and should be treated as such. Lance had tried to remind him that _they_ were the ones who were actually imposing on him and Pidge, but Hunk would hear none of it.

They had called Shay, who had been more than willing to take on the project. They scanned and sent her a copy of the code with the promise that she would show it to her grandma the next day. She would report back to them. Hunk had brought the phone to the next room to say a bit more to his "friend from college," but Lance didn't butt in there.

It would be very soon that they would know the contents of the file—of _Keith's_ file. Once they did, it would hopefully clear up one of the biggest questions in their investigation: what part does the government have in this whole ordeal? This wouldn't explain the meteors or the mysterious third party, but it would put them closer to discovering those things.

However, that wasn't what Lance had a hard time purging from his thoughts. What he couldn't escape was the nagging wonder at how this was all affecting _Keith_. Obviously he must have been excited to know that this theories of government conspiracy were at least _partially_ founded, but this was offset by the fact that his name was implicated. He was somehow involved.

As much as Lance tried to run though the facts in his head again and again, they always led back to that nagging concern for his partner's mental well-being.

Finally, after lying on his back on the air mattress for what felt like hours but probably wasn't, he sighed. Then, he opened his mouth to speak.

No sound came out, so he closed it again. He paused for a moment, listening to his partner's breathing, and once he had used that steady rhythm to steel himself, he tried to speak again.

"Kog—Keith?"

The bed rustled next to him. His partner readjusted himself, and Lance could hear the faint _hm?_ of a positive reply. Lance took a deep breath and continued.

"Whatever we find out, Keith, you…" He trailed off, but then he found his strength again. "You know I've got your back, right?" He paused again, and then: "No matter _what_ happens."

He let that hang there, in the space between them. The air felt stale, all of a sudden, and it wasn't just the residual heat of the desert trapped in the seldom-used room. He found that though he couldn't' see his partner in the dark—not that Lance was looking for Keith; his eyes were just facing upward, toward the ceiling—he could _hear_ very well. Perhaps his senses had adjusted to the darkness and his non-sight senses had become more acute. Maybe, in a contradictory theory, he was just wildly overthinking things. He could hear the faint rustle of sheets against skin as Keith made even the slightest of movements, the gentle breaths he took in the dark, and the unbearable and seemingly-audible silence between them.

"Thank you," came the short reply, after a stretch of silence that seemed to be _hours_ long for Lance. After this, Keith's bed was silent for a moment more before the rustling began again, and Keith spoke up.

"I've—I've always been somewhat of a loner," said Keith. "Sometimes by choice, sometimes not. But I've figured out how to live my life pretty well on my own."

Lance opened his mouth to say something, but he closed it again.

"I wasn't exactly keen to get a new partner when you were assigned to me," said Keith. "And not just because I knew you were just here to spy on me for Ross. I—I never really have played well with others, I guess, and I just…" He broke off.

"Keith," said Lance, "I wasn't sure about _any_ of this, but after working with you over the short amount of time that I have, I…" He found it hard to find his words again, and his eyes trained on the black expanse of the dark ceiling. "I am not saying that I believe in everything you say, or all of your theories, but…" His voice grew steadily lower as he spoke, down to the point where he was speaking just above a whisper. "I've seen your conviction, and… well, I believe in _you_."

After that, there was no immediate response from his partner. Lance was himself taken aback by his own emotional vulnerability. He actually hadn't expected his partner to open up to him the way he had. They lay there in silence together, and although both of their minds were doubtless running over the words they had just shared with each other, the silence was comfortable. The two of them felt the warmth of that emotional space between them, and it was in that place were they each eventually found their way to a much more restful sleep than they had expected.

33

Lance was able to sneak away from Keith mid-morning, leaving him to work on something with Pidge—Lance hadn't even really seen what they were doing, but it involved long strings of words Lance understood, though not necessarily in the ways they were using them.

Lance made his way—walking with his jacket left behind at Hunk and Pidge's house, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows—to the outskirts of town, where he found himself facing a nondescript home. Shirogane's home.

It took him a moment to get up the courage to knock, but he finally did, and it was just a moment before the door was opened, after a few locks were slid open.

"Lance?" asked Shirogane, opening the door wider as he did. His eyes were wide with surprise. "Er—Agent McClain, sorry—"

"Lance is fine," said Lance.

"—what are you doing here?"

"I, uh…" said Lance. What _was_ he doing here? The las time they'd spoken, he'd insulted the man and left quickly. He and Takashi were not exactly on the best of terms. He sighed. "I wanted to apologize. And…" He trailed off. He'd get to the second reason for his visit later; first things first, he had to get past the things he'd done to Shirogane.

"Mind if I come in?" asked Lance, and after the briefest hesitation, Shirogane stepped aside to let him in. Moments later, they were both sitting at the same kitchen table they had sat around just a few days ago. The silence was thick, and Lance understood that it was his job to break it.

"Takashi, I'm—I'm sorry about the way I acted the other day." He paused, then continued, very aware of Shirogane's unerring ability to maintain meaningful eye contact. "I didn't believe your abduction, and so I went in with a bad attitude, and you don't… I shouldn't have disrespected you like that. I'm sorry."

He paused, and Shirogane kept the eye contact. He wasn't angry, but Lance could see something else behind his eyes. He took a moment before he spoke.

"Thank you, Agent McClain—Lance." He smiled a thin smile. "I know it took a lot of courage to come out here." He shifted in his chair, his hand resting lightly over his prosthetic on the table in front of him. "And I accept your apology. I know you didn't—you know what? I've heard far worse about what I've said."

"Thank you," said Lance.

"But I do have a question for you," said Shirogane. "And please, don't feel awkward or anything; I just want to know."

"Okay."

"Do you believe me now?"

Lance wasn't sure what he had expected as a question from Shirogane, but that wasn't it. He tried not to let his surprise show on his face, but he was sure that Shirogane had seen at least a glimpse of his initial reaction.

"I… I don't know," said Lance. He looked down, away, anywhere but into Shiro's eyes, which were striving to meet his, to encourage him to continue. "I mean; I don't know that I _can_ accept everything that you've said."

"Neither can I," said Shirogane, sighing. His hand traced over his prosthetic again, and he seemed to be lost. "But I don't have a choice."

"We found something, Takashi."

"Call me Shiro."

"Shiro."

Shiro nodded.

"I can't say I believe in everything you've said, but that doesn't mean I think you're a liar," said Lance, choosing his words carefully. "I don't mean that to offend you, it's just that…"

Shiro's expression softened. "I know," he said. "The story is a little far-fetched. And I'm not sure I would believe it, were I in your shoes."

"But I think there's something to it. Like the government hushing you up so quickly." He paused, bringing his eyes up to meet Shiro's again. "Yeah, they might just not have wanted the bad publicity in the wake of a failed mission. Or…" He trailed off, and Shiro nodded to him to continue. "Or, it could be that there was something more that they were hiding, and you were getting a little too close to what that really was."

"What did you find?" asked Shiro. His voice was even, practiced, but it was clear by the slight uptick in the tone of his voice at the end of the sentence that he was very interested in what Lance was telling him. He was hungry for more information.

"We found proof that there is something more that there seems to be in the Kerberos mission," said Lance. "And that they're suppressing more than just what you had to say."

"What are they hiding, Lance?" asked Shiro. Lance glanced down to the table, and Shiro's hand and prosthetic were both pressed against the surface of the table, hard. His arms were tense.

"We found files—so many files. All of them encrypted, and we're working on that now, but they definitely didn't want these to be found."

"Which means what?"

"Which means that this case got a hell of a lot more complicated," said Lance. "And I just wanted to apologize to you in the wake of this… this new information."

Shiro let his arms relax a little, and crossed them across his chest as he sat back in his chair. "That wasn't the only reason you came here," he said. "What's eating at you?"

He was more perceptive than Lance was ready for, and he sighed. "It's Keith."

Shiro stiffened a bit, but said nothing.

"There were… names, in every one of the files we found. One of those names was Keith's, and that means that he is somehow involved in all of this, and I'm not sure how he's going to be able to move forward, being so personally involved in the case like this. And I don't want to…"

"You don't want to smother him?" asked Shiro.

"Yes!" said Lance, exasperated. Shiro had put it into words. "We're not as close as seasoned partners—this is our first case together, and we barely know each other, but I'm _worried_ about him. How this is affecting him."

Shiro raised an eyebrow. "You know, I've known Agent Kogane for a long while."

"I figured that you both hadn't met when we got to town," said Lance.

"But we didn't just meet on a conspiracy theory forum or some other crack science site you might think we did," said Shiro. "We met a long time before that."

"What do you mean?" asked Lance.

"What do you know about your partner's life before the bureau?" asked Shiro. Lance thought back on it. Now that he remembered, he realized that all he knew about his partner beyond the conspiracies and his badge was that he had once eaten some crab legs while working violent crimes.

"Not enough," said Lance.

"Then you know about as much about his parents as he does," said Shiro. "And about as much about my parents as _I_ do. We were in the same foster home for a while, though, which I think was fortuitous for the both of us."

They were _orphans_. That explained some of Keith's loner attitude, or at least where it might have come from. Lance nodded and allowed Shiro to continue.

"He's always been something of a recluse, you know, and he hasn't worked well with others." He hesitated, and Lance could tell there was something that Shiro wasn't telling him.

"What do you mean?" asked Lance, pushing him on.

"It's not for me to say," said Shiro. He held up his hands defensively. "It's not that I don't want to talk to you, it's just—it's Keith's story, not mine. It's not mine to give you."

Lance felt annoyed at first, but after a moment, he realized that Shiro was right. It wasn't Shiro's place to reveal things about Keith that Keith didn't want to talk about. He wouldn't push there.

"What can I do for him, then?" asked Lance. "He's been acting all weird since we found his name—and I expect that, but…" He sighed. "I don't know what else I can do for him, and I don't want him to feel like he's left all alone to deal with this. Because… well, it's a lot."

Shiro shifted in his seat, and another slight smile played on his lips—this one a bit more serious than the one Lance had gotten earlier. "If you're coming to ask me this, I think you're already on the right track," said Shiro. He leaned forward. "Let him know that you're there for him, but don't force it. He's been on his own a long time—most of his life, really—and he doesn't like other people telling him what to do, how to do things. He's headstrong. But if you give him the opening, he'll come to you."

Lance felt something rising inside him, as if he was getting choked up, but it wasn't sadness. He could feel that lump in his throat. "Th-thanks," he said. "Thank you, Shiro."

"You're welcome, Lance," said Shiro, crossing his arms. "And… keep me updated, okay? I know that he's a loner, and he'll probably be more likely to reach out to you because you're there, but Keith? He's like a little brother to me. We may have grown apart a bit, but I want to make sure… I want to be sure he's okay."

"Will do," said Lance, standing from the table. "Thank you again, Shiro." As he stood, Lance could feel a huge weight coming off of his shoulders. He had, in one conversation, somehow repaired what he'd done to Shiro and gotten at least a bit of a clearer picture of how to work with his partner. He shook hands with Shiro and allowed himself to be led from the house, beginning his trek back toward Hunk and Pidge's house.

Keith was a loner, and he's try to do things on his own—Lance could deal with that. He wasn't a very emotionally open person. But Lance was his partner, and he was going to help him through it. He'd opened up to him last night, and that was a start. As soon as they had the translation, that would put them closer to where they needed to be. They would know what Keith's connection was and how this all had to do with Kerberos and the meteors.

Lance was so caught in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice the black car that trundled past him on the highway once he'd rejoined it, headed out into the desert. He also almost didn't notice the glint of something flashing in the sky above. He did notice, though, and it was only after he'd put two and two together that he was rushing, at a full-on sprint, down the side of the road. There were more meteors. During the day. And if they were big enough to be seen brightly during the day…

They needed to get there, and they needed to get there fast.

* * *

 **Agent Karen E. Kosseff** : Is it your partner? Is there a problem with trust?

 **Scully** : No. I trust him as much as anyone. I trust him with my life.


	11. Decipher

_A/N: ty to hobbit_hedgehog for the help AS ALWAYS with the beta... a lot of this chapter was written past my bedtime while I was microsleeping so apologies for the MOST typos ever in the first draft lmao_

* * *

 **Decipher**

* * *

Scully: Mulder… let's get a team out here. Let somebody else do this.

Mulder: Help me, Scully.

* * *

34

It had been less than a minute before they had picked Lance up in Hunk's SUV—which he was driving, white-knuckled, Keith backseat driving from the seat just behind him the whole time. "You called just as we were about to call you," said Keith. "Pidge's instruments picked up on the falling meteorites—or debris." He paused. "Where were you, anyway?"

Lance opened his mouth to come up with a reply when Hunk took too tight a left turn off of the old highway and into the desert, sending Keith, who, in his haste to get going, had not buckled his seatbelt—sprawling onto his partner. He pulled himself up and off of Lance, giving Lance the half-moment he needed to realize just how sweaty he was from walking around in the desert sun. As soon as that had passed, he shoved Keith up and away from him. "Get offa me!" he grunted, and Keith made it back into his seat just in time for Hunk to pull a quick stop, almost slamming Keith's face into the back of the headrest.

"Let's go," said Lance, patting Keith's shoulder as he unbuckled his seatbelt and quickly exited his side of the car.

Lance squinted against the sun, but he found that his eyes adjusted pretty quickly. In front of them, about fifty yards away, was an impact crater. It was not large—maybe seven or eight feet in diameter, by Lance's estimation, and shallow. There was debris and scattered rock all around the site, but the whole team ignored the outer debris and walked toward the epicenter.

"We're the first ones here," said Hunk, his eyes rapidly scanning the horizon around them. Pidge was next to him, not looking up from their small, handheld instrument.

"Something with an impact that big, falling from the high you've postured…" murmured Lance, glancing down at Pidge's device. They pulled it away from him.

"It means you can do the math without breathing down my neck and reading over my shoulder," said Pidge. They adjusted their glasses. "And you're right—this is the biggest meteor we've had yet—it's probably the only reason you were able to see it during the day."

The actual impact must have come while they were bouncing around in the back of the car—it was the only reason they hadn't felt the faint tremor undoubtedly given off by an impact of that size. Lance knelt down to get a closer look at the crater, but Keith stepped right past its boundaries to the large piece of debris in the center.

"Pidge, Hunk, do you have any ideas about what this is?" he asked, squinting against the sun as he examined it closer. Lance stood up from where he was kneeling at the edge of the small crate and joined them at the meteorite itself.

The chunk reached just past Lance's knees, and was about three feet by five feet, a jagged, almost squarish lump. He knelt down next to it in order to inspect it further.

The piece was definitely roughed up from its fiery fall from the lower atmosphere. Lance reached out to touch it, and soon found that it was not as hot to the touch as he would have expected, for something that had fallen as far as it did. At least, he didn't pull away with any new burns, as he probably should have.

In fact, when he pulled his hand away, he didn't feel any pain at all. It was warm from the hot desert air, but expressed none of the appropriate heat from a sub-orbital drop, as they'd assumed it had fallen.

"Hey," said Hunk, calling the attention of their small group, pointing toward the west. There was a faint line of dust kicking up on the horizon, on the way toward them from the opposite direction of town. Something was coming.

"Whatever we're doing here,' said Lance, "let's hurry it up and do it quick—we're going to have some company very soon."

The others looked up an immediately saw the source of his urgency. Pidge looked to Hunk with a face they must have, just judging by his reaction, given to him more than a couple of times before.

"No," said Hunk, looking down at the space artifact. "There is no way I'm going to be able to get that in the back of the car."

"Not even if we all help you?" asked Pidge.

"Not even then," said Hunk, shaking his head. Lance could see that his head wasn't the only thing that was shaking; he could see the tremor in Hunk's hands as he responded to his roommate.

"So we can't take it with us," said Lance, "what's our next step?"

"We could talk to them, and…" Keith shook his head. "There's four of us, so we have some numbers, but I know that the government has made larger groups disappear with less of a fuss than you'd think."

"Dammit," said Lance.

Keith stopped and turned to him. "You _care_ , don't you?"

"Of course! There's someone coming for us, and we need to get out of here! I _do_ have a sense of self-preservation, Kogane." But Lance knew that he wasn't just talking about being interested in getting out in the quickest way possible. Lance had to admit to himself, though he didn't think he would ever admit this to Keith as well, that he was very interested in this piece of space junk, this rock that was so clearly not just a rock, and that he didn't want to leave behind the one real tangible piece of evidence they'd found of extraterrestrials since they'd come out here. If it was from an extraterrestrial craft, that was. He still wasn't sold on that. But this would be the thing that would be able to prove or disprove it, if it was…

Even as they all fretted, the cloud of dust grew larger. Lance reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, snapping a few pictures of the thing from a few different angles. Pidge noticed what he was doing, and they moved next to him to see what he had gotten. "No," they said, "get that side." They pointed to one of the corners, and Lance dutifully followed their directive. As he finished the pictures, he slid his phone back into his pocket.

"Even if we can't take it with us, we can still have proof," said Lance.

"I'll do you one better," said Keith. Before Lance could ask him what he meant by that, he took a step toward the piece of debris, grabbed ahold of a jagged edge that was twisted, where it had evidently broken free from the rest of whatever this thing was and placed the heel of his shoe firmly against the piece of debris.

"Keith! What are you doing?" exclaimed Pidge, throwing their hands up in horror. "You're corrupting the sample! We don't know what you might be doing to it, and…"

"The people coming behind us are also going to want it in one piece," said Keith, yanking on the chunk he had in his hand, his forearms straining as he pulled. "So far as I think about it, we're better off with a chunk and they can have whatever shit we leave behind."

"As a scientist, I hate this," said Hunk, "but as a potential secret government captive, he has a good point."

Keith just pulled harder again, the sweat standing out against his forehead. Some hair had plastered there, right above his eyes, which were intensely focused on his task.

Lance looked from his partner to the dust cloud, which he could now see what much closer than it had been before. He could make out that it was a black car, and that was just familiar enough to motivate him to move just a little faster.

"Let's go," he said, catching Keith by the arm and Hunk with a glance. Keith pulled one last time, the chunk coming off in his hands and sending him sprawling backward before catching his footing again and allowing himself to be led back toward the SUV. "We don't have time to talk about this here."

Hunk bounded toward the car, reaching it first and starting it up. Pidge was the las tone to join them all at the car, scrambling after them and sliding into the backseat next to Lance.

Moments later, they were off, forming their own cloud in the desert to mirror the one from which they were fleeing. In Keith's hands was a chunk of the metal to mirror the much large bulk they'd left in the crater, disappearing in the rearview behind them.

35

They couldn't have been back at the house for more than a half an hour before Keith disappeared. Lance didn't say anything at first, just skulking around the house a bit as Hunk and Pidge did their work on the little bit that Keith had broken off when they had escaped. They were looking at it under microscopes and scanning it with a number of instruments that looked mostly homemade. Lance didn't step in because he knew that his expertise was much more "telescope" big-picture than the microscope they were using.

He was hoping that he'd be able to talk to Keith for a little bit, at least. He should have been in a good mood after the positive developments of the case in finding the new piece of meteorite debris, and it would be as good a time as ever to talk to him and let him know that he could be there for him, sort of like how Shirogane had told him to. That was something he was looking forward to doing, that is, if he could find Keith at all. However, his partner seemed to be nowhere to be found.

He expressed his concern for Agent Kogane to the other two, but they both just shrugged. "He's been in and out the whole time we've been working with him," said Hunk, "I don't know if he's checking out a new lead or if he's just down at the diner."

"He did the same thing online," said Pidge. "Like, on the message board. He was much more of a lurker than a poster." They paused. "At least, until there was something that really got him heated." They turned back to the tinkering they were doing with an instrument that looked to Lance to be something like a plugged-in electric magnifying glass. What the electric part was for, he wasn't sure, and he turned away before he could find out.

"Do you think he's doing to be okay, going out on his own?" asked Lance, looking toward the door. It was closed against the oppressive New Mexico heat.

Pidge shrugged. "You managed fine on your own, didn't you?" they said without looking up.

"He's got survival instincts," said Hunk, "I'm sure he'll be fine."

Lance let it slip and felt the concern for his partner settle somewhere between his heart and his lung, there to push on his breathing and his heartbeat until they found Keith again. It wasn't that he didn't trust Keith to protect himself, it was just that they were dealing, they assumed, with some pretty dangerous people. So he worried.

He typed out a text to Keith: "where r u?" But then he deleted it and just called his cell phone, selecting the "Agent K. Kogane" contact and pressing the little green phone icon. It rang for a minute before going to voicemail.

"This is Agent Kogane. Leave a message." The whole thing wasn't five seconds long. Lance didn't leave a message, he just ended the call and slipped his phone back into his pocket. His partner was competent and smart, but there were powers conspiring against them that made him uneasy when he didn't know where Keith was. It wasn't like when he had slipped away to talk to Shiro—Keith had been distracted by his talk with Pidge and Hunk about their shared theories. Lance was friendly with them, but he didn't have the same obsession; he couldn't get lost about it. So he just stood a little way off, eventually wandering into the kitchen, worrying about Keith.

He wondered what Shiro felt like, if this was what he always felt like, a brother figure of sorts for Keith. Lance felt that pain in his chest again and pushed that image out of his mind. Instead, he wandered away from Hunk and Pidge to the door to the garage, looking out through the door after he opened it and upward toward the sky. It wasn't totally black yet, but it was getting there. The sun was casting a brilliant set of hues, the rocks below, and the purple shade of dusk. In the sky's brilliant color, Lance could make out the patterns of constellations as they began to appear in the mutable sky. He breathed in the fresh, dry air of the desert and looked around him. Keith wasn't out here, but he imagined that unless Keith was down in a basement room like the one they had both visited the other day—the one with the shelves and shelves of files and information—he would be somewhere with a view of the same stars. That might be something to take comfort in—even though the whole universe was currently and constantly growing, changing, and expanding, the earth was in its same spot, at least according to the scope of human knowledge. That wasn't to say, Lance reasoned with himself, that the earth wasn't moving; he knew that it was drifting away from the Big Bang spot, as all matter was—according to all known laws of physical and astrophysical science—but to people? To him, and to Keith, and to everyone else on the planet? The place where the earth was in a constant. And the stars they saw from that stationary earth were vast and unchanging as well in their ancient capacity.

And even though he was the same person, Lance McClain, former astrophysicist and current FBI agent, he was changing in relation to the world around him. Even if everything else seemed the same, that didn't mean that he was the same. He was seeing things differently—he was taking seriously the idea that there might be crash-landed alien technology on earth (or, at least, he was allowing for the benefit of a doubt). He was opening himself up, emotionally—something he rarely did despite his old reputation for being a flirt back at Quantico and in the physics department.

The way in which he was allowing himself to be seen—to be really seen, not just doing a dumb "never have I ever" or a "five questions" thing at a college community building activity he was forced to go do because his RA was finally taking her responsibilities seriously. He was allowing the side of him that felt things, that sometimes thought with his heart rather than his head and brought him rashly and abruptly to a different place than he'd originally intended to go. And that scared him. Especially when he was realizing pretty quickly that he felt things about his partner. Protective things. He was his partner, after all, and it would make perfect sense for him to be completely worried about where he was going, and wanting to make sure that he would come back safely, and be even more worried when he slipped off without letting him know where he was going…

Hunk shook him out of his daze, waving a hand in front of his face. "Earth to Lance," he said. Then, he took a step back and put the kitchen phone back into its receiver. "I just got the call from Shay. Her grandmother was able to translate the file."

Lance almost shook his head in disbelief. "Really?" he asked. "What did it say?"

Hunk shook his head. "Shay said her grandma wouldn't tell her, but I gave her the number for the fax machine at the post office. She said she'd have her fax it over in about fifteen minutes."

Lance nodded. "Let's go get it, then!" he said. He turned to find his partner before immediately realizing that he was without him again. "Er… should we wait for Keith to get back?"

"Depends on what's in the file," said Hunk. "We'll probably want to go get it anyway, rather than leave it there."

"Yeah," said Lance, but he knew that without Keith, this wouldn't be as sweet a victory, if that was what it was.

36

The report came through slowly, and that was the most frustrating part to Lance. He could see the printer shaking as the message came through, and he was mentally willing it to go faster. Not that it would do anything, but he stared at it intensely as if it would. As soon as it was done, the postal worker snatched it off of the printer tray and handed it to Lance quickly, as if sensing that he was nearly about to leap over the counter to get it from her anyway.

"What's it say?" asked Pidge, standing on their tiptoes, trying to see what Lance was reading on the page.

"Should we wait for Keith for this?" asked Hunk, looking around the nearly-empty post office. "I mean, it's about him, right?"

Lance heard this suggestion, and Lance was pretty sure that he was right. But that didn't mean that he wasn't curious. And that didn't mean that he hadn't already voraciously read half of what the even, measured handwriting—with a faint wiggle, indicative of an elderly hand—and was continuing on down the page, his eyes darting left and right as he took in all of what she had translated.

"Holy shit," said Lance, taking a step back to catch himself, as if what he had just read had knocked him back off of his feet.

"What _is_ it?" asked Pidge, and they finally just snatched the paper from Lance's hand. They squinted their eyes behind their big glasses for a moment, reading intently over the sheet at a pace that was nearly twice Lance's reading speed, and gasped.

"Okay," said Hunk, looking almost ashamed as he took the paper from Pidge when they handed it to him. He scanned his eyes across the page, all of them in their own little world. The postal worker didn't seem to care about them loitering anyway. Lance, however, noticed that she was still there in the room with them and, after a moment, pulled the other two, including the awestruck Hunk, outside where they wandered over to the car as if in a daze. For a moment, and they just sort of looked at each other, none of them quite believing what they had just read.

"We have no reason to think that Shay's grandmother would be pranking us," said Hunk. "I mean, she likes to joke around, but…"

Pidge shook their head. "This is the real deal. This is what we've been looking for. I mean, what we've been looking for _all along_."

Lance shook his head. If he hadn't retrieved the paper himself, seen the place where it had been stored himself, actually been the one to pull it out of a secret file in a secret government warehouse, there would be no way that he would be able to believe that this was real. Hell, he was still having that problem. And yet here it was. Here was the proof these conspiracy theorists had been looking for all this time. It was the smoking gun, and better yet, it was a physical piece of proof clearly explaining what that evidence meant.

They all shot one last glance in through the window on the front of the post office building to the woman who was sitting at the desk. She was intent on her crossword puzzle, but didn't seem to be looking after them. She hadn't snuck a peek, hadn't noticed what an amazingly important document this was, that she had just held in her hand.

The words were clear enough, and plain to see even in the fading light of the evening, only semi-obscured by Lance's hand when he took the paper from Hunk and got into the back seat of the SUV.

 _KEITH KOGANE, SUBJECT #2331,  
_ _IN-UTERO EXPERIMENTATION  
_ _IMPLEMENTATION AND HYBRIDIZATION,  
_ _EXTRATERRESTRIAL DNA.  
_ _PROJECT_

* * *

 **Scully** : Not everything is about you, Mulder.

 **Fox Mulder** : Yes, but...

* * *

 _A/N: Okay so... quick story (I know you just read a bunch of my_ story, _but bear with me). So that little twist, the one I revealed right at the end? I've been planning that since I started this fic. Like, literally, when I was planning this out, I had been watching the X-Files (of course) and I loved the arc about Scully being experimented on with hybrid human-alien DNA (I didn't like that they were doing it to Scully, but I thought it was a cool conspiracy for them to uncover). So when I decided that I was going to do an X-Files AU, I wanted to include that sort of storyline as a part of the conspiracy they're discovering. AND, at the time (when only season 1 of VLD was out), there was a super popular fan theory that Keith was Galra because he could operate their tech and because his hand turned purple for just a second that one time. So I liked that particular fan_ theory, _and thought that this would be a fun way to work it into my fic AND have it be a major plot twist._

 _Fast forward to one of the most simultaneously gratifying and disappointing times of my life, in season 2 of VLD when Keith is revealed to ACTUALLY be Galra. I was psyched that the fan theory had been correct because it meant that there were so many new and interesting implications, but I was also SUPER BUMMED because I knew that when I finally got to this point in the fic, this scene would lose some of its power, because duh, of_ course _Keith's Galra. That's canon._  
 _Anyway, I didn't rewrite it because I still like it as a part of the larger conspiracy and I want to keep on with what my original plan was._

 _And a_ sidenote _, (not related to the above story), I wrote a piece for a really cool zine (Lancito!, a zine all about Lance and his Cuban heritage, all of the proceeds of which will go to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico and Cuba) all about Lance's feelings of guilt for leaving home behind and his emotions about finding a new home and developing as a person. Check the zine out on_ tumblr _at .com._

 _And thanks as always for reading! I'm amazed at all this fic has done and how it continues to grow and it's super important to me and I'm glad others like it, too!_


End file.
